5 Best Tools for Teachers Lessons Plans

In recent years, there has been a drastic shift in the awareness about the learning and teaching process. NEP 2020 advocates holistic learning, arts integrated education, value integrated education, story integrated education, etc, Teachers have to be prepared with good material and ideas – as they enter the classroom. Only then can they engage the students for holistic education.

Lesson plans act as a guideline for teachers to use to plan out what students will learn, how the lesson will be taught as well as how learning will be evaluated. Lesson plans help teachers to function more efficiently in the classroom by giving a detailed outline that they follow during each class. This helps to make sure that every moment spent in class is utilized and students have a fruitful discussion on topics – with very clear ideas on what they will learn and achieve at the end of the class and also at the end of academic session.

A lesson plan is an important piece -  towards assembling and creating a complete and proper curriculum. It looks deeper into the details to make sure that you provide your students with the right skills, attitude and awareness -  so that they can make the right decisions and even make good career choices.

Having a lesson plan that has been carefully constructed for every lesson boosts your confidence and results in having purposeful learning sessions with your students whenever you enter the classroom. It also integrates and weaves the big picture of what has to be achieved in the full academic session into interaction for each period. This ensures that planning for skills that are developed over a long period of time such as - critical thinking skills, creativity, etc.. – are not missed out.

However, a quality lesson requires time, commitment, dedication, and creativity. Unfortunately, time is not a luxury that teachers possess; as they already have enough work in their hands in addition to the time and focus needed to produce a customized lesson design.

Thankfully, to make your job easier, we have curated the 5 best online teaching tools for teachers to prepare their lesson plans in much simple and easier form. With these apps, websites, and online lesson planners, you can easily create and organize lesson plans on a weekly and yearly basis and customize them for your own use.

tickLinks

tickLinks is a free and easy-to-use platform and app, it uses progressive educational practices and makes available lesson plans that are tailored to different boards and curriculum. The lesson plans include clear learning outcomes, activities, worksheets, stories, case studies, videos, etc.. Teachers can add their own resources and plans as well.

In the app, topics are broken down into period and chapter-wise lesson plans with clearly defined objectives for student learning. tickLinks, by OLF, helps teachers to find the right resources- Lesson plans, activities, worksheets, videos, etc. It reduces their class preparation time and improves class effectiveness.

tickLinks has over 9,500 high-quality lesson plans for Class 1-10th covering - Maths, EVS, Science, English, and SST. These are open links and freely accessible. tickLinks have covered school lesson plans for CBSE and various state board curriculum- Punjab, Assam, Jharkhand, Meghalaya, etc..

PlanbookEdu

PlanbookEdu is an online teacher lesson planner that makes it easy for teachers to create, share, and deliver their lesson plans in the most efficient manner. PlanbookEdu is an online tool that teachers can use to keep track of classes and lessons. With the help of Planbook, teachers can indicate how many classes they have in a day and which standards they would like to use.

PlanbookEdu provides a free account where you can only have one planbook, but a year-long Premium account allows for multiple planbooks. Planbooks provide a feature of clickable calendars in which you can click on a week in any month to access that week's planner. You can create and schedule recurring events.

Common Curriculum

The website's tools of Common Curriculum are designed in such a way so that it can meet the needs of individual teachers, collaborative teacher teams, or administrators seeking to promote school-wide collaboration.   Common Curriculum is an online curriculum organizer, lesson planning, and calendaring tool. After creating an account, teachers can create a Planbook and customize it by adding subjects, color-coding, sequencing the flow of the day, and choosing a planning template. The help page and user-submitted suggestions -- along with some to-the-point video tutorials -- give new users quick, clear guidance. Teachers can go through all the how-tos or dive right into calendar setup and planning.

ReadWriteThink

ReadWriteThink is an online learning resource that contains lessons, interactive activities, printables, and an app to help kids improve their reading and writing skills. From the IRA (International Reading Association) and NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English), the website serves specialized language arts teachers from pre-K through 12th grade.

The site is organized into the sections like Classroom Resources, Professional Development, Videos, and Parent & Afterschool Resources. Each heading contains hundreds of unit plans, lesson plans, and various activities, each divided by subject, learning objective, and grade/board level. While this tool is focused mainly on language arts; learning materials for science, math, history, and life skills can also be found here.

NearPod

Nearpod is the go-to online lesson planning tool for interactive presentations and assessments. Teachers use this site to create original multimedia presentations for a better understanding of the students. Nearpod provides real-time tracking of student’s work which makes it efficient for teachers to work effortlessly, enabling students to take ownership of their learning rather than passive teaching. Teachers can control the timing or launch homework sessions in which students move through at their own ease and pace. Either way, it's easy to see who is and who isn't viewing the presentation, which helps with classroom management and boosts the appropriate use of technology in the classroom.