Standards for the DoDEA and Australia Curriculum can now be included in your planbooks.  You can add them by clicking on Planbooks in the main navigation, then editing an existing planbook or creating a new one.

If you click on the button you will be presented with a list of the subjects and grades, so you can only include the standards you need.

DoDEA

Australia Curriculum

In addition to Common Core Standards, PlanbookEdu also allows you to enter your own custom standards. This tutorial will walk you through how to create your first set of standards.

Enable Custom Standards

Custom standards must be turned on for any planbook you'd like to include them in.  To do that go to "Planbooks" in the main navigation and either create a new planbook or edit an existing one.  One you are on the edit screen click the "Show Advanced Options" link to expand the full set of options.

Towards the bottom you'll see a section called "Standards" with two options.  Check the box next to "Custom" to include custom standards in your planbook.

Adding Custom Standards

Click your planbook name to go to the calender view. Once there you will see a new option in the menu called "Standards".

When you first go to the Standards it will be empty. To create your first custom standards set click the "Add Standards" button.

To create a custom standards set you need to give it a name. There is also an option to share your standards anonymously with the PlanbookEdu community. More on that later.

Once you have given your standards a name you can begin entering them. Each standard has a code and a description. When you add the standard to your plans you will be able to search for either of these.

You can add as many standards as you like by clicking the "Add Another Standard" button.  Once you are done, save your standards by clicking the "Save" button. You can come back later to make any changes or add new standards.

Using Your Custom Standards

Once your standards are saved you can include them the same way the Common Core are included.  Go to your plans and edit any of the entries. You need to use the "Edit" link, not the quick edit mode. Start typing in the Standards box and list of matching standards will appear. Select the standard you want and it will be added to your plans.

Sharing Custom Standards

When you are creating your standards there is a checkbox to anonymously share your standards with the PlanbookEdu community. We hope that if you are creating a custom standard set that you believe will be useful you'll check the box. Once we have a good collection of standards we will provide a way to search and include these community standards as an alternative to having to create your own set.

PlanbookEdu is happy to announce that you can now embed your lesson plans directly into your site.  This is a great way to make it easy for your students or parents to see what's happening in the classroom. 

Setup

To get started you first need to share your planbook.  You can see our tutorial on setting up a shared planbook here.  The one setting to pay special attention to is "Access".  You must set that to "Open" for your planbook to be embeddable.

Once you have saved the shared planbook you will see an additional option "Embed" under the "Actions" column.

Clicking on that will allow you to customize exactly how you want your planbook to appear in your site.  You can choose one of our default sizes or customize it to fit your site.  You can also select the default view, choosing between the current week or the monthly calendar.

Generating

Once you setup your embedded planbook click the "Generate" button get the code and see a preview.  If you don't like the way it looks you can change the settings and re-generate.  Once you have it setup the way you like simply copy and paste the code into the HTML of your site to have your planbook appear.

Example

Here's a sample Planbook embedded in this blog:

PlanbookEdu has always had the ability to adjust the font size of text within the boxes, but now we've included a way to adjust the size for all your plans at once.  This is something many teachers are have asked for and we're excited to launch it for everyone to use.

Advanced Options Menu

The top bar on the weekly view was getting a bit cluttered with icons so we moved some of them, including the new font size buttons into an advanced menu.  To access the menu simply hover over the wrench icon.

The new menu will appear below.  The first icon is toggles the spell checking on and off.

Font Buttons

There are three new buttons for adjusting the font size.  The first one (with the arrow pointing up) increases the font size.  The last one (with the arrow pointing down) decreases the font size.  The middle one resets the font size to the default.  Any changes you make are remembered when you jump from week to week, log out and printing from the browser. 

Printing

The font menu also appears when you print from the browser. It shows to the right of your plans, but will dissappear when actually printed.

This can be used as a quick way to shrink your plans so that they fit on one page.

Let Us Know What You Think

We hope everyone likes this new feature.  Let us know in the comment if there's anyway we can improve it!

This feature is only available to teachers who are using PlanbookEdu as part of a school or district wide initiative.

Up until now the only way to "turn in" your planbook for your principal or administrator to see it was to use the sharing feature.  This was cumbersome because you either had to share your entire year at once, which gave no indication that a particular week was ready to be viewed, or update your share settings each week.  For the administrator it can be hard to track so many shared planbooks and keep up to date when new weeks were ready to be viewed. 

For Teachers: Turn In Your Planbook

When looking at the weekly view you will see a new option in the upper middle.

Clicking the link will turn in that week of your planbook.  This means that week will now be viewable by any of the administrators in your group.

If you have already turned in a week you'll see a message which includes the date you turned it in, along with an option to undo.

For Administrators: View Turned In Planbooks

Group administrators will see an additional option in the navigation bar: "Group". Clicking on this to bring up a list of all the teachers in the group.

The column "Latest" shows the most recent weeks turned in for that teacher.  Clicking on a particular week will bring you directly to that week.  There is also a "View All" button for each teacher which will show all weeks that have been turned in.

We hope that the schools and districts using PlanbookEdu find this feature useful.  We are open to any feedback or suggestions that will improve teacher and administrator collaboration.