Organazational Tools and Lesson Plans

Happy June everyone!  It's officially summer here at my house and everyone is really excited to relax by the pool, eat a lot of popsicles, and spend long summer days doing what they most enjoy!  This week we had the opportunity in The Connected Educator to look at some organizational tools we may not have heard of and also to explore different lesson planning websites.  I have to say this has been one of the most beneficial weeks for me, as I had not heard of many of these organizational tools!  CHECK OUT this fantastic list of options we had to choose from!  I copied this to My Drive so that I can continue to add new sites as I find them.  What a handy document to help me think of ideas to integrate technology into my classroom!  I listed just a few of my favorite using Adobe Sparks' Page option below...




One of my favorite finds that I just stumbled across was PlanBoard by Chalk.  This online plan book seems wondrful!  I have been looking for an online way to organize my lesson plans and this free option seems like the ticket!  Check out the beautiful layout...

There was so much I loved about this program as I played with it.  There is an option to connect my state standards and link them to the lessons I am teaching. It will even keep track of when they have been covered and how many standards I still need to cover.  I want to explore further and see if I can add my district standards as well.

A great feature is that lesson plans can be embedded with YouTube videos, Google Drive items, links to websites and more, enabling the teacher to just click and be right there without leaving the site to access resources.  And if you need sub plans for the next day the printed option is very clean and easy to read...

Another assignment we had this week was to explore different lesson plan sites where we can obtain quality lessons.  This assignment gave me the excuse I needed to take the plunge and actually purchase a resource from Teachers Pay Teachers that I have had on my wishlist for quite some time.  Teachers Pay Teachers (TPT) has a wide variety of free resources as well, but for this assignment, it was worth it to me to pay and get the entire unit, complete with a demonstration video.  I am so pleased with the number of documents and plans that came with this Colored Pencil Lesson.  I intend to use this with my classes this fall to introduce them to the basics of colored pencil techniques...since I did pay I don't want to violate the authors work by posting, but here is a LINK to the fantasitc package.  I highly recommend this package for middle school and high school.

Well, that's it for this week!  Everyone go enjoy some sunshine ☀️ and I will see you next week.

Mrs. J