“A well-designed packet gives both teacher and students everything they need for the lesson at their fingertips.” You can read more about Double Planning here: http://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/tlac-2-0-excerpt-double-planning/
A while back we looked at using Google Classroom as a great place to create your packets - getting all the materials for a lesson in one place. But it is not a great way to plan. Trello is a tool which allows you to collect your resources and plan. So Google Classroom is where the students will see the lesson and all that is required of them. Trello is where you work with the lesson as you are planning it, and all the others you will give.
Trello
If you go to www.trello.com you can set up a Trello “board”. On your board, you can do your planning for the year and/or term, by adding “lists”. Then you add lessons, topics or projects to the lists as cards. All of these are moveable, so your planning is quite flexible and can respond to changes.
What is so great about it is that you can populate it with everything that you need to run the lesson/project. You can use it as a place to collect resources, create checklists, write lesson notes, add due dates. It has a “power up” feature which allows you to link to Google Drive files or folders. So it is also a place where you can reflect the process involved in a lesson or project.
As if that wasn’t enough, it also can be shared and worked on collaboratively. So that is a great way for teachers within a department to plan together and share resources.
Here are some screenshots from the Grade 8 Global Studies Trello Board.
This is what a board looks like - The lists are the headings at the top, the cards are the blocks under each heading. You can use colour to code the cards.
If you open a card, you can see that it offers many possibilities. I have added a link to my Google Drive where I have a template which will be used in the lesson. There is a checklist of the key skills, a due date and space to write many notes. You can also add links to websites, and any files which for some strange reason might not be in your Google Drive.
All in all, this is a brilliant tool for being organised, while also providing a space to collaboratively plan, explore and think ahead.
More info:
Lemov, D. (2015). Teach like a champion 2.0: 62 techniques that put students on the path to college. Jossey-Bass, a Wiley brand.