OMNIFOCUS AS A LESSON PLANNER

I have been looking for something other than the old lesson plan book or word processor template to use as my lesson planner for a long time.  I am currently using a paper plan book and recently have been searching for a decent electronic plan book (I am just started to use a Word template that I had when I was teaching before).

I have tried several different paper or electronic lesson planners and haven’t been happy with any of them.  The paper ones are labor intensive and when you make a change or need to skip a day, they get messy pretty fast.  The electronic ones have had issues with either being too detailed, not flexible enough or didn’t integrate with my main productivity software, causing me to have to use two different productivity software packages which doesn’t work for me.

After doing yesterday’s post on OmniFocus, I got to thinking why couldn’t I use it as my daily lesson planner.  You know the one that Administration always wants to see in hard copy .  I knew that I would have to setup a template to get started.  My biggest problem is that I don’t know all of the functionality of OmniFocus yet, but figured this would be a great way to learn some of the different things I can do with the program.

So I sat down for about three hours and planned out next week’s lesson plans using OmniFocus.  While I was doing this a couple of little things became apparent.

1. This could actually work
2. That there are a lot of capabilities that OmniFocus has I need to learn about.

Actually, after putting together the lesson plans this afternoon, I can see that it is better than other systems that I have tried so far.  As I learn more about OmniFocus and what I see as a couple of work-arounds this will become a very powerful weekly/daily lesson planner for me, so that I don’t have use paper anymore.

It might not be a true lesson plan data base and not everything can be setup automatically, but it integrates nicely with my daily planner and TODO lists, which is something that I have wanted for a long time, one system for most everything.   Hopefully, as I use it more familiar with OmniFocus, I will be able to add other things like differentiation and UDL into it, to make it more useful to me in preparing lesson for my classes.

The benefits I see in using OmniFocus as my lesson planner are that I will be better prepared when my Administrators come around and look at my Lesson Plans, only using one productivity suite and being able to easily edit/change the lesson (date or content).

This could be a very good Win-Win situation for the Administrators and myself, but mostly for my students, they deserve to have me at my best and if I have planned a lesson, the chances are it will be better than some of the seat of your pants lesson that happen from time to time (even though some of those can be pretty good).

Now to figure out how to go even more paperless.