As teachers, we know that time is our most precious resource. We want to spend it engaging with students, building relationships, and creating meaningful learning experiences—not getting lost in administrative tasks.

What if there was a better way? A way to reclaim those hours spent on logistics and focus on what truly matters: teaching. The answer lies in leveraging the right technology.

By integrating digital tools into your lesson planning workflow, you can not only save significant time but also enhance the quality and impact of your instruction. This isn’t about replacing the art of teaching; it’s about empowering you to be more efficient and effective than ever before. Let’s explore how.

The Core Benefits of a Tech-Enhanced Lesson Plan

Using technology to streamline your lesson planning isn’t just a trend; it’s a strategic shift that offers tangible benefits for both you and your students.

1. Save Valuable Time

This is the big one. Digital lesson planning tools, especially those powered by artificial intelligence (AI), can help you generate lesson outlines, find relevant resources, and create differentiated activities in a fraction of the time it would take to do it manually.

Reusable templates and content libraries mean you’re no longer reinventing the wheel for every unit. This efficiency frees up more time for you to focus on direct student support and classroom engagement.

2. Enhance Organization and Collaboration

Forget the physical binder or desktop folder filled with mismatched files. A cloud-based lesson planner keeps all your materials—standards, assessments, notes, and handouts—in one central, easily accessible location. This also makes it a breeze to share plans with colleagues, department heads, or substitute teachers, fostering a more collaborative and cohesive educational environment.

3. Promote Personalization and Differentiation

Technology allows you to effortlessly tailor lessons to meet the diverse needs of your students.

Many tools can help you quickly modify content for different reading levels, generate alternative assignments for students with IEPs or 504 plans, and even suggest activities that align with specific learning styles. This targeted approach ensures every student receives the support they need to succeed.

Essential Technology Tools for Modern Lesson Planning

The market is full of apps and software designed to make a teacher’s life easier. Here’s a look at some of the most effective types of tools and what they can do for you.

AI Lesson Plan Generators

These are the game-changers. AI tools can take a simple prompt—like “photosynthesis lesson for 5th grade”—and generate a complete, standards-aligned lesson plan in seconds.

They don’t replace your expertise; they give you a high-quality draft to edit, refine, and personalize. This helps you overcome the dreaded “blank page” syndrome and gives you a powerful head start.

• Tip: Use these tools to brainstorm ideas, create multiple versions of an activity, or generate a quick quiz.

Digital Notebooks and Whiteboards

Platforms like Microsoft OneNote and Evernote are perfect for capturing and organizing ideas on the go. You can create digital binders for different subjects, clip articles from the web, and even jot down notes from a professional development session. This keeps all your planning content in one searchable, secure place.

• Tip: Use a digital whiteboard like Miro or Jamboard to map out complex units visually with your team, webbing concepts and ideas just like you would on a physical whiteboard.

All-in-One Lesson Planning and LMS Platforms

For a truly streamlined experience, consider a dedicated lesson planning software or a learning management system (LMS) with strong planning features.

• Planboard: A popular digital lesson planner that lets you align your teaching with educational standards and provides a clean, user-friendly interface for building and organizing your weekly plans.
• Google Classroom/Canvas: While primarily an LMS, these platforms offer robust features for organizing assignments, distributing materials, and communicating with students and parents. You can build your lesson structure directly within the platform.
• Nearpod: This tool not only helps you create interactive, media-rich lessons but also provides a platform to deliver them, with features that allow for real-time student participation and formative assessment.

Actionable Steps to Get Started

Ready to embrace a more efficient way of planning? Here are three simple steps to integrate technology into your routine.

1. Start Small: Don’t try to digitize your entire year’s worth of plans overnight. Choose one unit or a single subject to start with. Test out a new app or tool and see how it fits into your existing workflow.
2. Explore Free Resources: Many of the best lesson plan templates and tools offer free versions or trials. Canva and Microsoft Create, for example, have thousands of customizable templates that can give your plans a professional look and feel. Explore what’s available before making a financial commitment.
3. Collaborate and Share: Connect with a colleague or a Professional Learning Community (PLC) to share your digital plans. This not only lightens the load but also builds a communal library of high-quality resources that everyone can benefit from.

By shifting your mindset and leveraging the power of technology, you can move past the administrative burden of lesson planning and focus on the joy of teaching. The goal isn’t just to save time—it’s to use that time to become an even more impactful, effective educator for your students.

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When lesson planning, a helpful tip would be to utilize the Understanding by Design (UbD) framework. UbD has become well-known thanks to Grant Wiggins, who has played a significant role in education. One contribution he has made to education is the UbD model. With this model, it is easier to ensure the curriculum is being properly aligned, which is essential. In the words of Grant Wiggins, “it is not a teaching tool, but a plan to make things better.”

This framework has planted the seeds for school leaders and teachers to reflect and examine the way they currently plan and rethink their planning if deemed appropriate. For instance, one of the “Five Big Ideas” by Jay McTighe and Wiggins is, “standards need to be unpacked.” A way to do this, to ensure teachers are truly understanding them and addressing them, would be to hold staff meetings or professional development opportunities. Those opportunities would provide valuable time to ensure the standards are being read and examined closely to plan for students more effectively.

Basically, the framework suggests using the backward design, which includes identifying desired results, determining assessment and evidence, and planning learning experience and instruction. Here, the focus is first on identifying the end result, or what exactly we want the students to have learned and planning assessment and instruction to ensure that what we intend for students to learn is truly being learned. Ultimately, the framework not only “promotes acquisition but also a student’s ability to know why knowledge and skills are important and how to apply and transfer them in meaningful, professional and socially important ways.”

When lesson planning, it is helpful to begin at the “end”, which is identifying what we want students to learn.

Outline Learning Objectives

If utilizing the UbD framework, the first step would be to outline learning objectives in lesson planning. When thoroughly thought out and prepared, lesson plans can be an extremely helpful resource — not only for submitting to administration but to remain organized and guide pacing. Learning objectives are a critical component from which to surround lesson plans. Beginning lesson plans with identifying learning objectives follows the UbD framework of beginning with the end in mind. Essentially, what is it we want students to know and learn? In identifying learning objectives, reviewing state and grade-level curriculum standards is imperative.

Being familiar with both will provide an opportunity to develop more effective lesson plans reflecting both state and curriculum standards. Learning objectives should be specific and attainable for all students. Further, once learning objectives have been outlined, it is important to make them visible to students and review them for each lesson. Doing so fosters student understanding of “why” and can facilitate student ownership in learning. Once students understand why they are doing something, it typically enhances student engagement.

Learning Activities

When utilizing the UbD framework, once learning objectives have been identified, learning activities must be planned. Think of the learning activities as: how students will learn the objectives? Now that we have established what we want students to know and learn, we must prepare learning activities. The students should know and learn what we want them to, as outlined by the learning objectives through the learning activities. The learning activities should be thoroughly planned out to engage students.

Planning learning activities requires a lot of thought not only around the learning objectives but around the students as well. For instance, how to differentiate and engage each student so that each can be successful. Learning activities include considering whether to read aloud, include a video clip, song, centers, whole group, small group, etc. Further, when planning learning activities, it is important to also plan and prepare the materials and resources needed. For instance, will different worksheets be needed for different center activities? Most likely, yes — it is important to have those prepared as well so that on the day of the lesson, everything is ready to go!

Learning activities should also include some sort of assessment, whether it is formative assessment or summative. Assessment is an important aspect of learning activities to understand whether or not students are learning what has been outlined. Assessment can serve as data to further inform instruction. For instance, some material may need to be retaught or presented in a different manner. Similarly, students may demonstrate mastery and will be able to move on.

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Michael Fullan, in his 2001 book, The New Meaning of Educational Change, describes a strong curriculum as a small number of high-leverage, evidence-based, easy-to-understand actions that unleash stunningly powerful consequences. When developing a subject level teaming concept, it is important to start at a very basic level. You cannot have a functioning team without first a guaranteed and viable curriculum. This coherent curriculum should include user-friendly topics and standards collected by teams of teachers to help support student learning.

In Jim Collin’s 2001 book, Good to Great, he states that the real path to greatness, it turns out, requires simplicity and diligence. It demands each of us to focus on what is vital and to eliminate all of the extraneous distractions. This cannot be truer when discussing writing curriculum at any level in schools.

Football Analogy

A football team year after year has an average record. Each week, when the coaches get together to develop this week’s game plan they search through books, the internet, and game film to develop a new set of complex plays because last week’s plays did not work.

The team never had a chance to master last week’s plays and are frustrated when a new group of plays is given to them to practice this week. The coaching staff is completely missing the most essential parts of what wins a football game. They need to focus on becoming really good at a small set of skills that can become transferable from game to game and make a high impact on the outcome of the game. It is important for the coaching staff to rely more heavily on ball security, tackling, and blocking than it is to develop a complex offense that changes week to week. This is going to make an immediate and substantial impact at their next game.

What will make an immediate and substantial impact in schools? Many educators are always looking for the next big thing, but it all starts with an essential set of learning objectives or big ideas that make up a grade-level curriculum.

Skinny Curriculum Writing

This same concept is true in any level of education. Teachers need to develop and become great at teaching a small set of skills that will make the greatest impact on student achievement. When a team can develop this small set of skills, they will give themselves, and more importantly, the students that they serve, a chance to make great gains in the school setting.

Just like the football team, we as teacher teams often times allow our school and district to live in a state of curricular chaos. The “what we teach” is so important, and staying focused on the curricular elements that make the greatest student impact might be boring but is effective.

Ensuring that all teachers on a team are working together to achieve this goal sounds easy but can be a challenge from a leadership perspective. Each teacher brings in a unique set of skills and is passionate about education in their own unique ways. The job of an educational leader is to bring all these perspectives together. Getting a whole school heading in the same direction can be challenging for all administrators but the payoff is remarkable.

Teaming Planning Inside a Curriculum Framework

When teams of teachers can describe on paper a consistent set of expectations that outline what they teach, then they are ready to move forward with the “how”. The “how” of teaching is the start of the grade level planning process.

The importance of teams working together to develop their craft is an essential component of a successful school. It is important to help these teams stay focused on their curriculum, while using data to make small, necessary adjustments to the curriculum. Effective instruction by a team requires a high level of student engagement that has a learning objective that follows a clear before, during, and after lesson plan model.

The before describes the anticipatory set with a strong, consistent bell ringer among members of a team. The during allows team members to work together to develop a set of important skills to understand the big curriculum development ideas. This includes the all-important exit ticket for teams. The after allows teams to use data and dissect the strengths and weaknesses of the lessons. The team will use the results of the exit ticket to make curricular changes. The true work for teams happens at this point. The grade level team has developed a skinny curriculum, created strong lessons, and is now ready to dive deep in to the day-to-day data work.

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