We have two great new additions to announce.  First is an expanded toolbar with new options for toggling the full standards text and full attachment name.  Second is a new print option, Day By Day, which will generate an entire week at once, separate by day.

New Toolbar

You can access the new toolbar by clicking the wrench icon next to your planbook title in the weekly view.

The new toolbar will slide out below the planbook title.

The font size and spell check were in the old menu and work similarly.  The Standards and Attachments options are new. 

Standards will only appear if you are using standards in your planbook.  You can toggle between showing just the standard code or the code along with the full standard text. 

Previously when you attached a file a paperclip icon would appear and you could see the file name if you hovered over it.  If you had multiple files attached to a plan it could be tricky to find the right now.  Now you can toggle between showing just clip or the full file name.

Day By Day Printing

We've supported single day printing for some time, but to print an entire week you would need to print each day individual.  With day by day printing you can print an entire week at once with each day on it's own page.  This is a great option for teachers with long plans.

Day by day printing has been added to the print options screen.  Right now only PDF format is supported.  We are working on adding the other formats, but there are technical issues with forcing page breaks between the days when printing from the browser or generating Word documents.

Share Your Standards

When you are creating your standards you'll see one or two options that will allow you to share your standards with your school or with entire PlanbookEdu community.

Note: The option to share your standards with your group will only appear for users signed up through their school or district.

If you plan on sharing your standards we ask that you follow a common naming convention which will make it easier for others to find them.  The format is Region, Grade, Subject.  For example: New Jersey, 2nd Grade, Math. The grade can be left out for standards that aren't for a specific grade.  For example: Arizona, Algebra II.

Finding Shared Standards

Like the Common Core standards you will first need to enable Custom standards for your planbook.  You can do this when you first create your planbook or when by editing it (Planbooks -> Edit). Click the button to toggle the Custom standards.  The red X will change to a green check.

After saving your planbook click on Standards in the main navigation.  There will now be button for searching the shared standards.

When you click on that you will be able to search by email address of the person who shared the standards or by the standards name.

The results will be presented below the search box.

You can preview any of the results by clicking on the name or the preview link.

Once you have found a set of standards that you'd like to use click the "Select" link and they will be copied to your account.  Then you can edit or add to them as needed. 

Note: Since you are taking a copy of the standards any changes the original author makes will not be reflected in your standards.  Likewise any changes you make will only apply to your version of the standards.

At the moment there are over 600 shared standards sets.  We hope you're able to find the standards you use, but if not you can add them using our custom standards and share them with the rest of the PlanbookEdu community.

In September 2010 we introduced the feature that made it easy to drag your plans around a week. Since then, almost daily, we've received some form of the email: "Please make it so I can drag between weeks!". We were listening, but wanted to make sure that feature was awesome before releasing. Today it's ready and it's awesome.

Introducing the Cubby

The Cubby is an area where you can drag any number of entries to be stored.  Then you can go to any week in the same planbook or a completely different planbook and drag the entry back out. Like normal dragging, the Cubby supports moving and copying.

How It Works

To begin start dragging any entry by grabbing the green arrow icon with your mouse. This is the same as you've always done to drag within a week.

On the left you will see a box slide into view. This is the Cubby.

Drag your item there and release. You will be presented with the same Copy or Move option that appears when moving a period within the week.

If you select Move the entry will be removed from your planbook and appear in the Cubby.  If you select Copy the entry will be left in your planbook as well as appearing in the Cubby.

You can drag as many entries to the Cubby as you'd like.

Cubby Tips

• You can open and close the Cubby by clicking the blue tab.
• If you have nothing stored in the Cubby the tab will not appear.
• You can remove entries from the Cubby by clicking the red "X".
• Cubby entries are stored indefinitely.  You can log out or even switch computers and they'll remain.

When we first launched the Custom Core Standards last year we had no idea that it would quickly become of the most popular features. Since then we've updated to allow for custom standards.

We know that the original standards system wasn't perfect. Our vision was for something much more.  Today we are very excited to release an update that brings us very close to the system we've always wanted. 

Standards Reporting

Although being able to include the standards in the lesson plans is great, it has always been cumbersome to figure out which have been addressed and which still need to be addressed.  We hope that our standards reporting makes this task easier.  You can read more about standards reporting here.

New Standards: DoDEA and Australia Curriculum

In addition to the Common Core we now include the DoDEA and Australia Standards.  Full details on the DoDEA and Australia Standars can be seen here.

Better Standard Selection

One of the biggest problems with the old standards system was that you had to include all the Common Core standards. This made finding the right standard to include in your plans difficult (since there were almost 1500 standards in the Common Core).

Now you can choose which standards to include by subject and grade level.

If you already have the Common Core included in your planbook, then all the subjects and grade levels are selected by default. You can turn off ones you don't need by clicking on Planbooks, then edit.  In the Standards and Curriculum section click on the Common Core button. You can then remove grades and subjects that aren't needed.

PlanbookEdu is very happy to announce an update fixing many of the iPad issues, including the ability to edit entries. There is no need to download an app from the Apple App Store. Simply to go http://planbookedu.com in the Safari browser. 

The one big difference is that word processing like editing doesn't work. This means you wont' be able to bold, underline, or add any special formatting to your entries. This is a limitation of the Safari Browser included in the iPad. We hope that a future update from Apple will fix this, but decided not to wait to release this update.

If you create an entry on your computer, then edit it with the iPad you will lose any text formatting. 

Otherwise editing works pretty much the same as on your computer.  A single tap on any of the boxes will open the quick edit. Or tap the "edit" link to open the full edit box.

Let us know what your think by leaving a comment or if you encounter an issue send us an email at support@planbookedu.com

Thanks!