Organize and Access Your Lesson Plans Anywhere

Have you ever written and taught a great lesson plan, only to lose it by the following year?  Or perhaps you wrote it in a Word document on your home computer and forgot to bring the file to school with you on the day of the lesson?  Or maybe you’re stuck at the in-laws for the weekend, but you need to update your lessons for next week and you forgot your laptop?

One possible solution is to sync your written lesson plans to the “cloud”, which is the cool kids’ way of saying the Internet.  That way, you can access your lesson plans from anywhere you have Internet access.  A big plus is that this doubles as online backup of your files, too.  So how can we do this?  Well, there are quite a few options, but I’ll mention a few here.

Taskstream ($49/yr or cheaper for multi-year subscriptions)

Taskstream is a web service that is designed specifically for educators to solve our exact dilemma.  You can develop lessons, insert standards into those lessons, organize the lessons into cohesive units, share and copy lessons from others, attach files, develop rubrics, and even download an archive of all your work as a local backup.  The interface is simple and intuitive.  It’s not free, but for what it does it’s a very nice solution.  I’m guessing you could use the teacher tax deduction and claim this as a classroom software expense, though.  My teacher intern program provided a free license for me to taskstream, and I found it to be such a useful tool that I was really sad when I had completed the intern program and that license expired.

Dropbox or Skydrive (free)

If you prefer to write your lesson plans in Microsoft Word or something similar, then you can still make those files web-accessible.  Skydrive is 25Gb of free online storage.  So you just upload your lesson plan files to Skydrive and you can download them from anywhere.  Dropbox only offers 2Gb, but has the added benefit of automatic syncing.  In other words, if you change one of your lesson plans on your home computer, that change is automatically synced to the cloud (the Internet) as well as any other computers that you have Dropbox installed on (like your school computer).  Both services allow you to share any of those files with others.  For example, if you need to send your sub the day’s lesson plans, you can just email them the link you the appropriate file in Dropbox or Skydrive.  Really, unless you’re including videos, 2Gb is plenty of storage for both lesson plans and associated files for most people; so, Dropbox is my preferred choice.

Evernote (free, with paid upgrades for more storage)

Evernote is a web service that also has desktop and mobile clients (Windows, Mac, iPhone, Blackberry, etc).  It is meant to be a universal receptacle for all of your notes, including pictures, web links, and even files.  However, we teachers can turn this around to make it be our universal receptacle for our lesson plans.  You can organize these notes (lesson plans) into virtual folders, give them searchable tags, embed images and files, and much more.  The best part is that Evernote indexes all of your notes so that they are easily searchable (it even searches text contained in images and does handwriting recognition)!  If you have handwritten lesson plans, you can scan them in and Evernote will allow you to search for words in your handwriting.  You can share notes with others (like a sub), too.  I’ve just started using Evernote, but so far I really like the features.  The desktop and mobile program versions sync with the cloud so your notes are accessible from anywhere.  Rather than a total storage limit, the free version of Evernote limits you to 40 Mb of uploads per month.

Screenshot of the Windows Evernote program.