Learning and Leading - June/July 2009

Lesson Planning Made Easy

AGerman professional development seminar titled How a 30 Dollar Piece of Software Changed My Life provides one example of how a program that a high school teacher designed out of frustration is taking root around the world.

That program, called Planbook, is lesson planning software with an easy-to-use interface that allows teachers to input data as basic or complex as they like. The software can create a plan based on a basic week with no variations from day to day or devise a more complicated schedule that changes each day. Educators can adjust for holidays and snow days, and they can add lessons on the weekends or at night.

Jeff Hellman, a high school science teacher in Elmira, Oregon, started developing Planbook two-and-a-half years ago after he got tired of using Excel to keep track of his lesson plans.

“I distinctly remember being given my first paper plan book by my principal and thinking, ‘This is ridiculous—why isn’t this done on the computer?’ ” Hellman says.

My inspiration was to save myself time during the day and stop copying information over and over again.

He tried Excel, but it lacked the capability to move lessons around to deal with changes in schedules. It also wouldn’t allow him to share his lesson plans with parents or other teachers. He found himself printing out copies of lessons and rewriting them on special forms.

“My inspiration was to save myself time during the day and stop copying information over and over again,” he said. “But I wound up with a program that literally thousands of teachers use daily.”

Hellman used CoreData, a Mac tool, to write Planbook. He spent the first year writing the beta version and in the fall of 2007 released version 1.0. The following year, Hellman refined the Mac version and started working on a Windows version that was released a year ago.

Now in his fifth year of teaching, Hellman is watching his creation spread far and wide. Teachers of all grade levels from around the world are using his product to simplify their record keeping and to easily s hare students” information with parents. Teachers are also using P lanbook to attach files such as worksheets or reading assignments, to export content to the Web, and to search for previous lessons.