Yep! It’s that time of year again! The time to slowly peel ourselves out of summer caves and re-enter the classroom full of hope and promise for an awesome school year, while still dreading the amounts of planning and marking that will undoubtably ensue.
I’m sure that new teachers and seasoned veterans alike have all thought at one point or another “how can I make planning easier?” followed by the inevitable (and repetitive) attempts at organizing our massive teacher binders. However, with the purchase of an iPad mini over the summer, I swore that this year things would be different!
Enter – Chalk.com –
Not only does this company provide teachers with a FREE online tool to help them plan their lessons, they also have a multitude of curriculum standards already in their system ready to be connected to your lessons. And to top things all off, they have a FREE iPad app which will allow me to plan wherever I go!
What this will do in short – is make my work life a heck of a lot easier! I can track my yearly progress and adjust my planning as needed very easily and won’t need to carry my massive teacher binder with me everywhere I go 🙂
In addition to their planning tool Planboard, Chalk.com also now offers an assessment tool called Markboard (in beta). Their whole suite of FREE tools should be up and running by the end of September which will also include a tool to take attendance and one to share files and lesson plans with other teachers in your school.
Now “free” is a term all teachers like, but even so, a free tool needs to be useful and easy to use in order for teachers to adopt it. Honestly, after setting up my classes for the year in Planboard and inputting my class lists into Markboard, I can see that the single-login platform is going to be very easy to maintain and use.
I assure you that I am in no way being asked to promote this tool, I genuinely love it! And I must admit, I love it even more now that they have the Quebec standards available 🙂
Well I hope that you have all enjoyed my first “Sunday Secrets” post! Stay tuned for many more to come throughout the year. There will be lots more “secret sharing” coming your way!