I had been using a combination of Excel (to get a highlevel view of my classes and lessons, and OneNote for doing detailed lesson plans. I still have a hard time getting away from the ease of using Excel to sketch out the high level view of my schedule but Planboard became my primary tool for organizing my lessons.
Overall, I really like the software. Some of the things I like are:
- Made in Kitchener, Ontario (support local)
- It handles our school's 9-day schedule fairly well (with some caveats that I talk about later)
- It generates PDFs of the week or the day which can be printed out to put in a day book to keep your admin happy.
- It allows multiple sections of the same course, so if you teach the same course multiple times, it provides a logical way for managing that.
- You can share lesson plans fairly easily between sections.
- Lessons can be organized into units.
- The sections and units are colour coded to help in identifying what's what.
- It handles PD days and holidays automatically once you enter them into the system.
It handles our 9-day schedule fairly well, although it's not able to handle our pandemic hybrid learning schedule which alternates students being in-class and on-line every other day. As a result, I have to identify the on-line classes manually. Hopefully this is the only time when this will be necessary.
It's also not able to automatically handle the fact that our Wednesday schedule is always shortened periods. Rather than 4 periods on the normal schedule with a lunch break in the middle, we have 4 55-minute classes back-to-back and the day finishes at 1:00. That means you have to manually edit each Wednesday schedule but it only takes about a minute or two to do this.
These are both unusual requirements so it's not surprising that the software doesn't accomodate this but I figure they're worth noting for people who face similar scheduling challenges.
The year of the pandemic was a year of constant changes so having a tool which allowed me to move around lessons easily was great. If you lost a day in the schedule, you just had to select a lesson and choose to "Push" it. That moved it to the next class and every subsequent lesson also moved. Similarly, you could pull a lesson earlier in the schedule and everything that followed would pull back one lesson as well.
How I used it - day-to-day
I always had today's schedule open in a single day view so that I was just seeing the current day. On another browser tab, usually also had the weekly view. The one thing you have to be careful of is that if you make changes on the daily view and then switch over to the weekly tab, the changes you just made won't be there and if you then make changes on the weekly view, you can overwrite the changes you made on the daily view.
Post-It note
There is also a handy post-it note feature for each day. It appears on the calendar view for each day and allows you to make notes about the day that might not be specific to a class. I used this to remind me of what photocopying I needed to do or marking that I wanted to get done during prep that day.
There's and App for That
As the saying goes, there's an app for that, and that's the case for planboard as well. An app is available for Android and IOS. The app works well and means you've got your plan in your pocket as well as on your computer. The daily view just shows you tht title of the lesson for each class but when you tap the lesson, you get the details.
What's missing
I really want a "Class View" or "Projector View" of a single class's current day schedule to put on the projector at the start of class. You can, of course, project the day view and just scroll to the current class, but the type is small and is hard to see by most of the class.
I'd like to see a "switch lessons" function which would allow me to select two lessons and switch them.
I'd like an indicator that shows not just the class times but also what period they are. i.e. Period 1, or Period 2, etc.
Overall
This is a very useful product and the learning curve is not too steep. There was some work required in getting everything set up correctly. Entering the daily schedule, creating the courses and sections, adding the PD days and holidays took some time but isn't hard to do. Once I had all that done and got used to the software, it was a huge asset. It kept me organized in a year of chaos. I have a terrible memory so having everything clearly laid out and available from my computer or phone (or printed if necessary) was really helpful.