How I use Notion as a teacher: a better, PRODUCTIVE way to plan!

💡 Get this Notion template: https://tripleteaching.gumroad.com

✳️ Hi legends! Here’s the overview of a time-saving Notion Template I’ve built to make planning, recording, and retrieving lesson ideas much more easy and efficient. Multiply your time, energy, and impact with Plan Perfect.

🎥 Step-by-step walkthrough of how to use the Plan Perfect Notion template:    • Plan Perfect walkthrough: Notion plan...  

🏪 Stores:
https://tripleteaching.gumroad.com
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/S...

⏱ Timestamps
0:00 Intro
0:25 Ineffective lesson planning
1:29 The problem with traditional lesson-planning
2:44 Why Plan Perfect is awesome

👨🏼‍🏫 I’m Ben, and I’m a primary school teacher in Melbourne, Australia.

🌐 Triple Teaching website: https://www.notion.so/tripleteaching/...

📫 Contact: [email protected]

🎵 Music:   / sunset-on-terra  , https://www.bensound.com


#notion #template #teacher #plan #productivity

⌨️ Transcript
So, I first started building this Notion lesson planning template when I was sitting in planning meetings and realizing how much time, energy, and effort I was spending on producing not very much in my normal planning routine. I'd be looking up past lesson plans or looking at my current term planner, trying to translate what I had planned a while ago into my current weekly plan and either not realizing what I'd meant, or it being a bit vague, or having remembered that I had a good idea at the time when I had taught that lesson last time but couldn't remember the improvement that I'd made. And I realized that this wasn't adding up to anything brilliant; that this was not my best work.

The tipping point for me was when I thought that the quality of the education that the kids in my care were getting was dependent on those 30-minute planning sessions at the end of the day, where you're brain fried and not feeling any inspiration or motivation, instead of benefiting from the best I've ever done, my best activities, all accessible, all ready to go. And that's what this Notion planning template really does.

You'll never lose, never forget, never be unable to access easily, your amazing lesson ideas and you do not have to spend any time setting this up. This template is all ready to go. All you have to do is use this template when you plan and by the end of the year or the end of the term, even, you'll have an entire term's or year's worth in a database and ideas bank of all your best ideas and activities and resources, all ready to go when you need them. I call it "Plan Perfect."

Here's how it can multiply your time, energy, and impact: it records all of your brilliant lesson, activity, and explanation ideas and makes them really easy to retrieve. Each lesson card contains whatever you prepared for that lesson, any resources you want to show, any materials, anything you might need to print beforehand, any reflections, improvements, and tips you thought at the time. You can quickly input them in there, and they'll be ready for you next time. You just tick a lesson card, and it appears in your weekly plan. No more rewording from formal documentation to your documentation on your weekly plans. Everything is there, ready to go, just one tick.

It automatically creates a list of the lessons you need to prepare for, with the materials visible and ready, so you know what to do and what to prepare. And if you didn't get to finish a lesson, all you do is tick "next week," and it will appear in next week's weekly planner instead. You can shuffle and rearrange the lessons in your week easily, and it will create a record of what you've done and the lessons you've taught at the end of each week.

If you have a buddy teacher or year-level teacher who's also using Notion, you can collaborate on a shared database, where you drop your lesson ideas into the shared database. They can benefit from it; you can benefit from their ideas. You can comment, advise, and give encouragement. It has built-in lesson card templates to remind you of the things you don't want to forget when you're planning, like a student checklist to tick off when kids have handed stuff in or any other notes you want to make.

Because it's Notion, you can access it on your phone, on your iPad, so I often have it open as I roam around the classroom, so I can project anything onto the projector whenever I need to, and also write down any notes and any improvements that I think of at the time.