Several platforms  provide lesson planning features  including Google Classroom and Edmodo, however, if you are looking for easy to use and simple lesson planners , the tools below are great to start with. They will enable you to easily create and manage your lesson plans, add multimedia materials to your lessons (e.g., text, video, and image files), access your lesson plans on the cloud anywhere with Internet connection, and many more. For templates, check out this collection of pre-made lesson plan templates.  


1- Planboard

Planboard is a good lesson planner from Chalk. Planboard helps you “create lessons in the intuitive online editor. Add in attachments, photos, and videos to bring your lessons to life. Then build lesson templates to cut prep time even further, and jump right into the classroom.’ Use the Standards Progression tool to see ‘curriculum progress for each class, and which standards have been covered. Planboard keeps your classroom on track”.

2. Common Curriculum

Common Curriculum is another good lesson planner for teachers. It offers a gamut of interesting features including: the ability to add various elements to your lessons (e.g., links and files from Google Classroom, Google Drive, or OneDrive). You can also search for standards to add to your lessons or add yours and Common Core automatically tracks which standards you have used and which are not yet covered. You can also copy your planbook to re-use with other classes if you teach the same content, or you can recycle activities or sections in your plan the way you want.


3. Planbook

Planbook offers a host of useful tools to help teachers develop, plan, schedule, and collaborate on lessons. Teachers can select from different lesson layouts and attach videos, images, links, assignments, and assessments to their lessons. They can also use the site’s repository to add learning standards and differentiate teaching strategies.

Other important features provided by Planbook include the ability to create ‘team lesson banks for full curriculum management’, control who can view lesson sections, allow substitutes to view lesson details and add instructional details for them, create seating layouts and charts for students, track students attendance, integrate your plans with Google Classroom and Google Drive, and many more.

This post originally appeared in Educational Technology and Mobile Learning ( www.educatorstechnology.com ).