Planning has always been a part of teaching. Not only is it necessary to figure out what to teach and how to teach it, but it is also important to be thinking about when you are teaching it. Planning and structuring the delivery of a curriculum is an art form in itself, requiring imagination, creativity and innovation. After all, we want the best for our students and from our students. Delivering a program that consistently builds upon prior knowledge and refines skills over the course of a semester will ultimately allow students to demonstrate their fullest potential.
The curriculum documents that guide our program planning in Ontario are detailed in their scope (i.e. we are asked to teach the creative process, the vocabulary and terminology of art, the critical analysis, art and society, art careers and community connections, etc.) through the overall and specific expectations. But once a semester gets rolling, and you are teaching multiple classes with similar but slightly different learning goals, keeping track of what you are teaching when becomes increasingly more challenging.
Now, planboardapp.com is making the whole process of planning each day, week and month a much more fluid process in which teachers can easily track their coverage of the curricular expectations. At the same time, it is important to remember that the curriculum expectations are a guide as to what to teach, and we are to address all expectations through instruction, but only are required to evaluate the overall expectations in Ontario.
planboardapp.com is a free service, which makes it highly attractive for me. As well, it is available on a variety of platforms. You can access this digital daybook on your desktop by logging into the website, or you can use the app on your iPad (visit iTunes). Once you have your account, you can customize your timetable so that the app recognizes what classes you are teaching on any given day (e.g. Monday I teach AVI2O0, AVI4M0 and AVI3M0 and Tuseday I teach AVI4M0, AVI3M0 and AVI2O0), and you can even search the on-line database of “standards” to link to a specific course. While planning you can actually identify what curricular expectations you are addressing on a given day. As you progress through the course, the software keeps track of what expectations are covered and how many times you have addressed each expectations.
The added benefit of using planboardapp.com is that we all know that our best laid plans are forgotten. School is a highly energetic, busy and ever changing landscape. We need to expect the unexpected, which means that we are constantly needing to revise our plans, and shuffle dates. Planboard has a simple and intuitive ay of copying / moving a plan from one day to the next, making it east for adjusting your plans on the fly.
planboardapp.com also has a useful feature for our own unexpected absences. There is a share function, like any good social media site, that allows you to export your day’s lesson as a PDF, email it to a colleague, or even embed it into a web page.
For a free app, Planboard has got it right. It is a very simple and intuitive tool to use, and has made my planning a much more fluid process. I would highly recommend it as another tool to use to make your day in the classroom just a little bit easier! The only limitation that I have found is that you have to have an internet connection in order to use the app!
Brian Leichnitz 