WeAreTeachers Blog

[#1]

Part of being a great teacher is planning great lessons.  That said, planning great lessons takes ingenuity and time.  Ingenuity—you have that.  But time?  Not so much.  So, read ahead to find six cool and innovative tools that will help you plan creative lessons without spending all of your free time doing it.

1. LearnBoost. You have great ideas—but if half of your time is spent getting your plans organized and written, then LearnBoost is the tool for you.  LearnBoost not only helps you to align your curriculum with core standards, but also gives you handy templates, a class calendar which can be shared with parents, students and other teachers and even helps you connect lessons and units. 
2. WeAreTeachers.  Yes, that's us!  But we have one of the most extensive databases of teaching ideas on the internet—and every one of our amazing teaching ideas and lessons was created by a real teacher. 
3. Pete's Power Point Salon.  Find free power point presentations that were created by teachers—all arranged carefully by grade and subject.
4. If you're working from a certain book, look online to see if the company offers a downloadable teaching guide (like this one from Crabtree publishing) that will help you to come up with questions, ideas and activities surrounding your lesson.
5. Teacher Templates.  Create lesson slides quickly with a free power point template.
6. Khan Academy.  If you're looking for videos—especially in the areas of science and math—then Khan academy has thousands all ready for you to use.

Question:  What tools do you use to plan lessons?

[#2]

These are great resources. I'm with Learning.com and would like to offer one more. Through our Free teacher accounts in Learning.com, teachers can create digital lessons and share them with other teachers, assign and track with their students, and integrate in with their other digital resources. We've worked with teachers to create a teacher-friendly place to find and use all your resources, and create units and sequences to individualize instruciton.

Here's more information, a short video that explains it all, and the place to sign up for a free teacher account: http://bit.ly/teacheraccts