A Great Place to Find Lesson Plan Ideas

Disclosure: TARA is currently an advertiser on FreeTech4Teachers.com.

Earlier this week I published a lengthy piece about a new tool called TARA and how it can help you save time this fall. My favorite of all the features in TARA is the strategy resource bank that is available to any teacher who wants to use it. In the strategy resource bank you'll find dozens of teaching strategies accompanied by free handouts to use in your classroom. 

In this short video I provide a demonstration of how to use TARA's strategy resource bank. 

Applications for Education
The resource bank is obviously a good resource for new teachers but it shouldn’t be overlooked by experienced teachers. When you feel like you’re stuck in a rut or your “old reliable” lesson plan isn’t clicking with kids anymore, browse through TARA’s resource bank for some inspiration for a new strategy to try.

Lesson Plan, Meal Plan, and Fitness Plan Templates

Last week Canva announced a handful of new features including a video editor and a desktop application. A new education-specific version of Canva was also announced. Those new features don't appear to have been rolled-out quite yet. But I did notice that there seems to be an expansion in the number of templates intended for educational settings. That includes a big set of lesson plan templates.

A quick browse through Canva's lesson plan templates gallery will reveal dozens of templates that you can easily copy and modify in your free Canva account. In the gallery you'll find templates for daily lesson plans as well as templates for planning a week's worth of lessons. Like all Canva templates, you can modify them with your own text choices, color schemes, and decorative elements. Completed templates can be saved as PDFs.

Scroll down through Canva's lesson plan templates gallery and eventually you'll come to templates for meal planning and workout planning.

Applications for Education
Canva's lesson plan templates could be great for those who like to print out their lesson plans in a visually appealing format. The meal plan templates could be helpful to those who are in charge of publishing your school's lunch calendar.

Once Canva for Education is up and running you'll be able to share and collaborate on lesson plans using the lesson plan templates.

Common Curriculum Helps You Create Common Core Lesson Plans

Common Curriculum is a new online lesson planning resource that aims to help you align your lessons to Common Core standards. In Common Curriculum you can enter your courses and write your lesson plans. After you enter a lesson plan into your Common Curriculum planner you can click "search for standard" to have Common Curriculum search for Common Core standards that might match your lesson plan. The more text that you include in your lesson plan the more likely Common Curriculum is to find Common Core standards that match your lesson plans.

Beyond the standards search, Common Curriculum has a couple of helpful tools for you. If your lessons tend to follow a particular pattern you can create a lesson plan template that you reuse across your schedule. If you don't have a blog or aren't consistently using a blog to publish information about your courses, Common Curriculum has you covered. Each lesson plan that you write in Common Curriculum can be published to a blog with just one click.

Applications for Education
I learned about Common Curriculum from David Berger who is going to write a guest post about he and teachers in his school are using it. I look forward to learning more David. In the meantime, I think that anyone who has to align his or her lesson plans to Common Core standards will find Common Curriculum to be a handy lesson planning resource.