Are you Disorganized? Well do I Have the Thing for You!

There are so many tools out there that are great for educators and some that maybe not so much. But I found a really great tool for teachers that are disorganized, which you really can’t afford to be. In saying this and keeping you wondering what I am talking about, let me get to it. I looked into a tool called Planboard. The site has aids that tells you what to do when you being. You do have to create an account, but it is free. Yay!

When you start up you account, it asks you to put in a semester, so I just put in what would be next years first semester to Christmas, just so I could see what this tool was all about.

From there you create your class schedule by adding in classes and the times you will be “teaching” them.

Once you have your classes in, you can you schedule daily, weekly, or monthly.

Here is were I began to get confused. It wanted my to put in the expectations for the class, and I wasn’t sure what it meant, and the search bar continued to say “No matches”. I was getting frustrated, until I decided to try numbers, and bam, something popped up. It was mostly USA curriculum stuff, so I attempted putting in Saskatchewan Curriculum, and the search lite up with different grades, and classes. However, it didn’t have everything and that was a down fall, but it does allow you to add, what they call “Standards”. The only thing with adding your own, you have to add in everything, outcomes and their descriptions.

This isn’t the only thing this tool has though. It also has a Mark Board as well as and Attendance Board.

To do a lot of the things on the Mark Board you need a student list, and you can do anything in attendance until you have that student list. However there are still some things you can do with the Mark Board. These things include adding types of assessment,

adding your students (when you have them),

and fixing or changing the categories and weight of assignments.

One thing I really like about this tool is that you can add your daily plans onto the board and project them onto the smart board for the students to see. there is also a little yellow sticky note thing that you can add anything to. You can also link google drive documents to your classes, so I linked all of my unit plans that I had for the classes that I created.

As teachers, we all know we enjoy our time off to recuperate, and on this tool you can add in holidays, which is important to add in. The reason it is important is because it adjusts your schedule so you can pick up right where you left off and not have to remember was day you were on last. And if you are really organized, you can create another semester and its classes so its ready for you when you get back after the winter break.

This tool is a very great tool for teachers that like to be organized or need to get organized. It is a bit confusing at first to navigate around, but it gets easier with use, as most things do. I do recommend it, I know I will be using it once I am teaching.

To set things a bit more straight:

Strengths:

1. helps with organization
2. does attendance
3. has a marking board
4. has a reminder post
5. you can create a class schedule/ timetable
6. you can link google drive docs
7. can add daily plan
8. can add different sections to the same class if you are teaching it to multiple groups.

Weaknesses:

1. “standards” are confusing to use in the beginning
2. doesn’t have every sask curriculum grades
3. doesn’t have every sask curriculum classes
4. if it doesn’t have your class you have to manually put everything in.

 

Me when I first started to use Planboard

Via Giphy