Planbook

The computer can prove to be useful with a lot of things, including teaching. That’s what Jeff Hellman did when he started teaching – he found that he could use the computer to send out emails and communicate with students, grade assignments with software, and create handouts with text editors. What he couldn’t use the computer for was to create and manage his lesson plans. And that’s why he came up with Planbook, a handy tool you can use to create and organize lesson plans.

Planbook is available for Apple’s Mac OS X (it was originally created for Apple’s operating system) and for Microsoft’s Windows (any 32-bit Windows edition from XP onward). Getting the application up and running on a Windows PC is a fairly straightforward matter: download a 2MB archive, extract its contents, run the pbinstaller executable, follow the onscreen instructions presented by the setup wizard.

When you launch Planbook for the first time, it asks you to specify when the school year starts and ends, to select the days when you teach classes, to provide a few schedule details, and to give a name to the course you want to create. Only after you go through this step, you can access the application’s interface which, to be fair, is not difficult to use at all. If you’ve ever used a paper planbook or an Outlook-like computer calendar, you won’t have any problems getting accustomed to this application’s interface.

You will be able to use this interface to easily access all the functionality that Planbook has to offer. You will be able to create and manage lesson plans, make adjustments for holidays and cancelled school days, publish your planbook, attack files and links, generate reports, and more. With this application’s help, you will find it quite easy to plan out your lessons and stay organized.

Planbook is free to try. The trial version is limited to 15 lessons per course and it displays a nag screen at startup. All the other functions and features are not limited in any way.

Go get Planbook if you want to save time, stay organized, and easily manage your lesson plans.