What lesson-planning tools do you use?

I am interested in the efficient use of teacher time, and this has led me to take a critical look at lesson-planning tools. I am interested to hear about the tools teachers use in creating their lesson plans. Do you create your lesson plans using:

A word processor such as Microsoft Word, Apple Pages, or OpenOffice?
An online lesson-planning tool such as Standards Toolbox?
A desktop lesson planning application?
Something else?

Also, what are your planning tools unable to do, that you wish they could do?

You can read more of my thoughts on the subject here, but these are the main questions I am thinking about right now.

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Permalink Reply by Wesley Emlet on February 7, 2012 at 6:20pm

I simply use a template I got off of Microsoft. They have tons of free templates that you can download and then manipulate so it works for you. I have seen web apps and other tools but for me the ease of using Microsoft Word to plan is why I use it!

Wes

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Permalink Reply by Kate Mason on February 7, 2012 at 8:00pm

Hi Eric. I also use a template I made on Microsoft Word. It works well, my team also uses it. We can email each other our plans to see if there's anything we want to borrow or share. It also makes it easy to save and look back at.

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Permalink Reply by Eric on February 7, 2012 at 11:37pm

Thank you for the responses, Wesley and Kate. I use Word and OpenOffice as well, because I've never found anything I liked well enough to use consistently.

I think I am just getting to the point in my teaching career that I wish my plans were more organized than a bunch of Word documents, though. Just like engineers have dedicated software like AutoCad, I feel like teachers should have a really good lesson planning tool. Writing plans in Word starts to feel like making architectural designs in Microsoft Paint after a while.

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Permalink Reply by John Lee on February 9, 2012 at 8:04pm

I use http://www.planboardapp.com. It is online based and works for me so far.

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Permalink Reply by Maria Smith on February 10, 2012 at 7:13am

I generally use Microsoft Word. Collaboratively, my KTeam post it on Google Docs and add things to our plans. We do team plans and individual small group lesson plans. I recently used planboard.

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Permalink Reply by Stacey Bell on February 11, 2012 at 7:23am

I just recently stumbled upon mindmeiter.com. It is an interactive mind mapping site. One option on this sight is lesson planning, it is done more in a web that can be shared an edited if you wanted to include your team. It is not free but it has a free trial if you wanted to check it out. The cost goes down if you has more people sign up with you which makes it easier to share.

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Permalink Reply by Kevin McManamon on February 11, 2012 at 10:51am

I've made use of Google Docs over the last three years for my main lesson planning tool. I like the universal access this allows me (work at home, log in at work or any other Internet connected computer at school like a computer lab or another teacher's room...). I've used both a personal gmail account, a specially dedicated "for school only" personal account and lately our school district provided Google Apps/Docs account.

Using the basic word processing function integrated with the Google Presentation, Spreadsheet, Drawing and Sites functionality has greatly streamlined my planning time and processes.

Cheers!

-Kevin McManamon

Portland, OR

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Permalink Reply by Kate Miller on February 12, 2012 at 11:47am

I use a table in Microsoft Word that my teammate used at her old school. It's fairly easy to maintain and we just save a copy of our plans on our share drive at school so that way our intervention staff and each of us can access it at school.