Unit Planning

I love it for planning units because it’s not hierarchical. When you type out a lesson sequence in Word, due to the nature of the software every new lesson idea automatically follows the next. In Notebook, after you type out the lesson plan title you can move them around, put them side by side, draw arrows on them to explain your thinking to colleagues, and rearrange quickly.

Here’s a screenshot of a unit plan on Notebook. Click for the full size image.

Unit Plan Snapshot

The really slick part is that the little paper clip icons represent links to attachments. So I can include the worksheets right in there, send it all to colleagues or to students.

Daily Lessons

I also love using the software to plan out my daily lessons. When students walk in to my class, they hear music and see the day’s overview, like this:

Daily Lesson Template

The consistent format – Warm Up, Laptops, Menu, Homework, Announcements – is good for the students. They come in and write their homework down, get started on a task, and have a heads up on what I’ve got planned for the day.

This doesn’t even tap into the interactive power of the software. I’ll mention that in a later post.

Now, it took me a while to get to this point. First, I was given to play during a professional development day, and I saw some colleagues using it in ways that challenged and intrigued me. But also, and more importantly, I put in time on each lesson to take risks and use it in front of the students. That’s how I learn new tools, and how I teach my students to learn new tools. You just have to press buttons and see what happens.

The sentence that stopped me in my tracks:

…Mohammed’s case [a tenured teacher in NYC charged by her administration as professionally incompetent] will probably have cost the city and the state (which pays the arbitrator) about four hundred thousand dollars.

Nor is it by any means certain that, as a result of that investment, New York taxpayers will have to stop paying Mohammed’s salary, eighty-five thousand dollars a year.

There’s a part of me that just wants out out out of teaching when I read about this.