Are you a teacher, feeling overwhelmed with all the things you have to organize and keep track of?
The everyday administrative grind can easily dull the passion of teaching.
Enter Notion. Considered the Swiss army knife among productivity tools, it can be employed in a myriad of areas and tailored to your specific needs.
Let’s explore how it can aid you as a teacher:
- Course Planning: Imagine having all your school-related stuff in one place. Not scattered across ten folders or lost in stacks of paper. Everything in Notion. Neat and structured.
- Resources: Ever spent 3 hours searching for that one worksheet, only to find it was right in front of you the entire time? Notion puts an end to the mess on your desk. With Notion, all your resources are always available and organized.
- Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Share your brilliant (and less brilliant) ideas with colleagues. Notion facilitates collaboration fit for the 21st century.
- Task Tracking: Who did what? Who’s supposed to do what? And when? Notion knows and keeps you informed.
- Reminders: Forgetfulness is human. Thanks to Notion, it can be avoided.
- Templates: Why reinvent the wheel? Simply copy the brilliant template from last time. Save time, not quality.
- Always Available: Whether you’re in the classroom, on the sofa, or in the restroom. Notion is always there for you, as long as you have internet access.
Is Notion the right tool for you?
Notion is like the shiny new toy every kid wants. But is it right for you?
For those opening Notion for the first time, the countless features and possibilities can be overwhelming at first.
That’s where templates like the Ultimate Teacher Planner come in.
The Ultimate Teacher Planner Template – created by Milo who is a Notion creator and teacher – promises to provide you with everything a teacher needs.
Milos’s goal was to help fellow teachers optimize their workflows so they can focus on what truly matters in their profession.
Above all, he aims to simplify the organization of lesson planning, resources, and student information with his template.
But does the template achieve this in practice? Let’s dive deeper into this template:
Ultimate Teacher Planner Template
Upon opening, the template’s clear structure is evident. For newcomers, Milo even provides a video tutorial.
As you scroll, you’ll encounter 7 dashboards:
- Teacher Dashboard
- Note Tracker
- Lesson Planner
- Bookmark Tracker
- Classroom Manager
- Student Tracker
- Task Manager
Teacher Dashboard
The Teacher Dashboard: The core of this template. A place where the six other dashboards come together and a direct access to the essentials of the template.
This dashboard starts with a calendar view that displays upcoming tasks and lessons. Beside it, you can see current projects, important notes, or pinned bookmarks.
Here is where you, as a user, will spend most of your time.
Note Tracker
This dashboard is for taking notes.
Capture, tag, arrange – all in a matter of seconds. This can be very useful for writing daily teaching notes, tracking student information, and jotting down teaching ideas.
This dashboard already contains several notebooks for ideas, class notes, or personal thoughts. If you have an extensive list of notes on a specific topic, you can also create a new notebook.
Optionally, you can delete existing notebooks and replace them with your own.
Lesson Planner
Lesson planning can be tedious and a bit complicated if you don’t know how to organize it efficiently. The Lesson-Planner-dashboard allows you to create new lessons with just a few clicks, drag and drop them into your calendar, or place them in lesson folders.
This way, you can easily plan your teaching year.
Bookmark Tracker
If you come across an interesting video, an engaging web resource, or a fun article for your lessons while browsing the internet, simply use the “Save to Notion” Chrome extension to save it directly to this dashboard.
The Chrome extension sends it straight to the bookmark inbox where you can review the content, tag it, and save it for later.
Classroom Manager
Your personal headquarters for each class.
The Classroom Manager is perfect if you want to create a centralized location for all your classes and share upcoming tasks, class announcements, and class information with your students.
The class pages created in this template are designed to be publicly shared with students, so you have a “homepage” for each class, but the page can, of course, also be kept private.
Student Tracker
With the Student Tracker, you can easily monitor the attendance and performance of your students.
This system has many advantages over large paper charts or big Excel files.
Each student also has their own page where you can add relevant student information.
And keep in mind, that you shouldn’t save personal information of your students in Notion when you are coming from an EU country due to GDPR.
Besides this, always make sure that you are allowed to save personal information of your students in Notion.
Task Manager
Chances are that you are currently not using a task manager! In this case, it’s high time, because, without one, it’s impossible to keep track of all the necessary tasks, especially as a teacher!
Fortunately, the Teacher Planner provides you with a neat and clean task manager that comes with all the functionalities we know from classic Notion To-Do templates.
The Task-Manager dashboard allows you to quickly create new tasks and also link tasks to projects.
Usability and Design of the Teacher Planner
The template stands out with clear navigation and well-thought-out usability.
Although some of the features of the Teacher Planner are quite advanced, even as a beginner, you’ll have no issues using this template after a short acclimatization period. The excellent tutorials by Milo ensure this.
In the end, I believe that this template is really well-suited for teachers and tutors, covering all essential aspects that can arise in daily school life. Of course, like any other Notion template, it can and should also be customized according to your preferences and ideas.
My Template Rating:
Usability: 5/5
Very well thought-out usability. Milo knows his audience and has put a lot of thought into this template. It’s evident that he uses it himself.
Creativity: 4.5/5
Templates for teachers aren’t reinventing the wheel. However, this is the best template on this topic that I’ve encountered so far.
Aesthetics: 5/5
The Ultimate Teacher Planner appears modern and has an easily recognizable color scheme. Milo plays with the colors without making it seem as though the template was dipped in a bucket of paint. Each section has its unique color tone, which makes it easy for users to always know where they are within the template.
Ready To Elevate Your Teaching Game? Get the Teacher Planner Template on Gumroad today!