Last year I took a risk and bought a premium  subscription to planbookedu.com and I am happy to say that after a year of daily use I can’t imagine managing my lesson plans any other way.

Some of my favorite features:

• easy sharing with co-workers and substitutes
• copying from one term to the next
• attaching files
• easy to export into MS Word or pdf files
• far less paper clutter in my life
• knowing that nothing can get lost

Another feature that I haven’t used due to the type of class I teach is the integration of Common Core Standards    in lesson plans–I can imagine that feature would be immensely helpful for k-12 teachers.

I am not a naturally organized person and I have spent many years looking for a lesson planning system that worked for my brain.  Planbookedu has been by far the most satisfying tool I’ve used.  If you are still planning on paper I urge you to take a look.  You might really enjoy the flexibility and security their product provides.

A moving piece from a first year bilingual teacher in Portland, Oregon.

I learned I am enough. I learned that beating myself up is not only ineffective, but the opposite of what I want to model for children. I learned which things I do as a teacher because they matter to me and which things I do because they matter to my administrators. I learned how to wing it. No, I knew how to do that. I learned that this is the perfect career for me, but it is OK to know when it was not the right fit.

I am in awe of all that the author is chooses to do and is required to do within the mainstream public school system.  It’s a little different in my  world of alternative ed but I can relate to so much of what she writes.

You’d think after 20 years of teaching I’d have my system for lesson planning well established. Oddly enough, I’ve never settled on anyone one approach.  It’s a very personal thing for a teacher and there are so many options.

Good old paper and pen is not a bad option but I don’t love dealing with piles of paper, sharing with colleagues isn’t easy, and, worst of all for me is that paper doesn’t allow me to integrate all the files, documents, links, and slideshows I use in my classes.

I thought maybe Microsoft OneNote, included in our latest Office upgrade, might be the key.  I tried for 2 years to make it work for me but I had issues going between computers and honestly, it’s too messy and I couldn’t figure out a way to organize the pages in ways that worked for me visually. I’ve been tolerating, but not loving OneNote as a lesson planner.

I’m a big Evernote user in the rest of my life.  Because it’s on my phone and accessible from any computer I use it’s great for web clipping, note taking, list making, recipe collecting, and even journaling but I haven’t found a way to use it as a lesson planning tool because it doesn’t have a calendar layout to help me visually organize my lessons.

The other day an ad for PlanbookEdu popped up in my Facebook sidebar. Curious, I clicked and discovered what may well be my dream planning tool. I’ve been giving it a serious look in the last couple of weeks and these are the features I love:

• Calendar layout with term, week, and day view
• Ability to attach files and insert links
• Option to download plans as MS Word or pdf files
• Easy share function
• Online format so lesson plans are available anywhere, from any web enabled computer or phone

PlanbookEdu offers a slimmed down free version but I’ll happily pay the $20 annual fee to have access to all the features listed above.

Having just lost yet another USB drive (this time due to a coffee spill) the idea of having my lesson plans safe from my occasional episodes of clumsiness and forgetfulness was very appealing.  The idea of being able to easily share those plans with my manager, my assistant, my colleagues, and any potential substitutes is also very appealing.

Additionally, the folks at PlanbookEdu seem very receptive and concerned about their customers.  I received an email this morning asking how I liked using PlanbookEdu and soliciting suggestions for improvement.  That makes me happy.

Am I the only teacher who’s taken this long tofind a perfect system?  What works for you?

Peter Menzel’s book Hungry Planet:  What the World Eats is nice to have in the classroom as the photos are always interesting for my students and they encourage lots of discussion.

While food  is an obvious theme, we end up talking about nutrition, geography, family size, and especially money  as the author includes weekly food spending for each family.

It’s not easy to use the book for whole class discussions but happily time.com has excerpts available which I like to show in class.

Online slideshow at Time.com

We’re in week 6 of our 11 week term right now.  I’ll give a midterm on Monday but we’re spending this week reviewing all the learning we’ve done over the past few weeks. There’s never too much review with beginning ESL students.

They were still somewhat shaky with numbers so I came up with a board game to use in small groups which would encourage them to use the numbers and review basic arithmetic.  I put my students in groups of three and gave each group a game board, markers, and a regular old six sided die.   They caught on pretty quickly and enjoyed the game more than I’d hoped so I am really pleased.   I heard a lot of English and a lot of laughter–can’t ask for more than that!

I’m uploading the game board file here to share with anyone who’d like to give it a go.  If you do try it out, please let me know how it worked for your class and how I might improve it.

I think I may have been the last person in the world to watch the viral YouTube video of matt dancing but I loved it instantly.  If you are one of the 13 people in existence who hasn’t yet seen it, it’s a four and half minute video of a guy (Matt!) doing his silly dance in various locations around the world.  Sometimes he’s solo and sometimes he’s joined by enthusiastic locals who want in on the fun.

Apart from being the kind of thing that makes everyone smile, it’s great to watch while learning present progressive verbs.  I usually show the movie all the way through once and then show it a second time, pausing to get responses from the students.  Some students will even ask to see it a third time as they seem to love it as much as I do.

I attended Day 2 of the Systematic ELD workshop today.  Once again, not much in the way of new information but lots of great conversations with colleagues.

One thing that interested me was the use of ESL specific board games for reinforcing new language concepts.  I use a lot of games in my class including hangman and bingo, but I haven’t really gotten in to making boards games.  Maybe I’m lazy and maybe I’m just a by intimidated by the thought of trying to explain rules to beginners and the chaos that’s bound to ensue, but after hearing how others use board games, I think I will try a few out.

My colleague Katie recommended Lanternfish to me and there are quite a few games which look useful even at the beginning level.  In looking around I also found some promising free resources at ESL-Galaxy.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with board games in the classroom.  Are there other great resources I should know about? Feel free to leave a comment.

Today I attended the first of three all day Systematic ELD trainings mandated by the school district that provides the bulk of my program’s funding.  It was an interesting group of teachers from a variety of alternative programs in the Portland area.

I had hoped for an opportunity to immerse myself fully in discussion about best practices based on the latest research in language acquisition but in reality, I heard nothing new today.  I did already know that socioeconomic conditions and prior education impact a student’s second language learning.  I did know that having students use language in a meaningful way helps them retain that language.  And I even knew that  taking a systematic approach to curriculum design and lesson planning allows students to fill in  gaps as they move through an ELD program.  No news there, sorry to say.  I guess what really surprised me was that some private publisher appears to be raking in taxpayer money  ($150 for a binder!)  selling the kind of information that just seems like good, common sense teaching to an experienced teacher.

What I did come to appreciate after listening to other teachers is what a great job we do in our program. While many secondary ELLs are lucky to get 30 minutes of language instruction daily, we provide 12 hours/week.  Teachers in other programs work with wide varieties of skills and abilities but in out program students place into one of five levels and receive instruction tailored to their specific needs.  Because we focus almost entirely on English Language Development (bringing in content to support language development) our students learn at a very impressive rate.

This has nothing to do with my ESL teaching but I’m also a mother to three kids. My two teenage boys have been struggling with math of late and we recently discovered the Khan Academy which is a comprehensive free resource for accessible tutorials in math, science, economics and more.

Salman Khan (not the Bollywood megastar with the same name, by the way) has degrees in electrical engineering, computer science, and business and has pretty much put all his knowledge in a wide range of areas out there for the world to use. It’s a huge and very admirable achievement and the site is getting lots of attention lately for good reason.  I loved reading about why Mr Khan chooses to make this fantstic resource available free to anyone with internet access.

I want to feel that I helped give access to a world-class education to billions of students around the world. Sounds a lot better than starting a business that educates some subset of the developed world that can pay $19.95/month and eventually selling it to some text book company or something. I already have a beautiful wife, a hilarious son, two hondas and a decent house. What else does a man need?

Now if only the Khan Academy would address ESL!

This article about Louisville’s CARE for Kids program made my day.  I am always happy to see teachers and students being treated as people and value placed interaction  and engagement in educational settings.  I hope this gets a lot of attention and validation and that schools adjust accordingly, even (especially) if it takes away from test prep.  Because I can’t think of a standardized test that makes students feel more secure or builds community.  Just saying……