Mega Seating Plan

Rob Cowen is Head of Physics at Preston Manor School and the founder of CowenPhysics.com and MegaSeatingPlan.com.

There are few professions as immediately rewarding as teaching, but a big frustration can be spending too much time on frustrating little tasks, like seating plans. I have tried all sorts of methods of making seating plans for my class: pen and paper, Microsoft Publisher, Excel-based templates. I’ve also found a few promising online tools for doing the job, but they inevitably cost money that neither my school nor I want to spend.

I want a tool that allows me to import my class data from SIMS or a spreadsheet, to automatically arrange the students around my classroom, to allow me to drag and drop to swap students around, to annotate my seating plan with all the data that SLT and Ofsted could dream of.

That’s why I created Mega Seating Plan. It is completely free and does all of the above and more. You can even use it as a random name picker to support your assessment for learning in lessons.

While Mega Seating Plan aims to make life easier for teachers, Cowen Physics is a website and YouTube channel inspired by the excellent Hegarty Maths, which aims to support both students and teachers of physics with revision videos, exam walkthroughs and more. With over 50,000 views in its first year, it is giving a leg-up to thousands of GCSE, AS Level, A Level and Oxford PAT students across the UK (and around the world). If you’re a student or teacher of physics, why not give it a try?