Last updated Feb 27, 2024
Whether you’re a teacher, a coach, a trainer, or an edu-preneur, you have a lot to do beyond the time spent actively teaching. Making a lesson plan for each class or session is a big part of the work. If you work at a small school or as a solo edupreneur, you may not have access to institutional tools for educators… And you’re probably not interested in shelling out thousands of dollars to get it! You may be stuck working with spreadsheets which, honestly, don’t have the best features to work as an online lesson planner for teachers. Take a look at Teamup as an accessible tool to draft ideas, prepare materials, plan and review lessons.
Why it matters: The right tools for educators
Many teachers and other educators feel stressed, overwhelmed, and out of time.
According to a 2022 survey, a great majority of teachers feel they don’t have time to prepare effectively for time spent teaching. 92% say that they don’t get enough time to prepare for effective teaching, and 86% report lacking the time needed for high quality lesson planning.
Having a smart system for the work you do helps you to be more efficient and effective. If you’re relying on spreadsheets or paper-based planners, you’ll likely end up dealing with these issues:
- Lack of organization: Navigating spreadsheets? Shuffling through papers? Finding what you need can be a constant struggle without an online lesson planner. The risk of redoing work and feeling overwhelmed is always looming, leaving you unsure if you’re truly prepared.
- Cumbersome transfers: There’s making the lesson plan, and then there’s delivering the lesson: getting it on the schedule, sharing materials, having the resources on hand when you lecture. Using different tools to prepare, schedule, plan, and review lessons — and share them with students — means a lot of manual tasks like copy/pasting or moving materials back and forth. It’s an extra layer of work.
- Privacy concerns: Confidentiality is an important feature in tools for educators. You need your lesson plans and drafts to remain private until they’re finalized and ready to share. And you may need a secure place to keep notes on student or client progress. Ad-hoc systems (like a spreadsheet + email + notes app + paper planner) don’t provide security.
Now, maybe you’re thinking, Great, thanks for telling me what I already know. After all, it’s not news to you that having the right tools to prepare, plan and review lessons would be helpful. Whether you’re at a gym with a client or in a classroom tutoring a student, you face the same challenges. There are high demands, tight timelines, and many factors to consider. You want your instruction to be effective. You want your students to benefit and learn. And you want maintain a healthy work-life balance, so working efficiently is key.
Try Teamup as an online lesson planner
So, what’s the solution to these challenges for solo-edupreneurs, coaches, and tutors? We’d like you to meet Teamup, which can work as an affordable, versatile, and secure lesson planner for teachers and others in education.
Here’s how Teamup works as a tool for educators:
Set up a structure that works for you
- Create sub-calendars tailored to your needs and organize them in folders.
- Selectively share sub-calendars with students, parents, clients, trainees, administrators, colleagues.
Whoever should have access can have access, while you maintain complete control over who can see what on the calendar. So you can share Calendar A with Client A, and Calendar B with Client B. Or share a single calendar with multiple people for a limited time period, then revoke their access after a training program is completed. It’s up to you. Meanwhile, you have an overview of everything that’s happening for each client, student, group, or class.
Have a private, dedicated “drafting” space
- Set up one (or multiple) private sub-calendars for lesson drafts.
- Upload resources and materials to lesson drafts, easy to share when ready.
Since you can control which sub-calendars you share, you can create a sub-calendar specifically for your lesson preparation that stays private. This is your virtual workspace for all your notes, ideas, lesson plans in progress, templates, resource links, and more. Everything you need for lesson planning and preparation can be organized in this “Draft” calendar. You can even create multiple draft calendars, if you’d like: one for each client, course, class, etc.
Enable smooth transition from preparation to delivery
- Easily add a completed lesson to the class schedule.
- Share lesson materials with students, parents, and others.
As you finish a lesson plan and are ready to add it to the schedule, it’s a single step to make it happen. Just drag or move a completed lesson to the appropriate calendar where they become visible to your students. No more manual copying and pasting. No more downloading files from one place to upload them to another place over and over. Everything you added to your lesson draft gets carried over to the scheduled lessons available for your students.
Get efficient communication, follow-up, and repurposing
- Review and repurpose past materials and ideas.
- Filter for lessons that match certain criteria.
One lesson is not one lesson. It’s a thousand lessons given to hundreds of students. You can quickly duplicate any lesson from one calendar to another, make it recurring, or copy it to future dates. Set reminders for yourself or students for review, so the learning isn’t lost. You can also use Teamup for efficient communication with students and clients: they can access course materials, read instructions, and use event comments to ask questions, give feedback, and even upload completed work.
Teamup can be a simple but effective lesson planner for teachers in all types of educational situations. (And yes, we’ve been talking about small-use scenarios, but the system scales! Check out this case study.)
A good system empowers you to prepare, schedule, and deliver lessons with ease, while providing a secure space for your drafts and private materials. Imagine how much simpler your work could be with a flexible, functional, secure way to communicate with students and share course materials. But don’t take our word for it! Take a look at these user stories. Then dive into a live demo calendar and see if Teamup’s got what it takes to be your new online lesson planner.