The new normal: Online Planners

Teachers and students around the world started or are going to start the new school year in a completely new situation. A situation that has never happened and with the concern that most of us do not know how to face it. “The new normal” will look different in every classroom around the world: some of them will teach remotely, others in a hybrid model, and some of them in a face to face model. Each of these situations has its own challenges but what all they share is the unknown future.

For this reason, we truly think that the best option for students’ planners is to create online planners. For those students who are learning remotely, it will help them to stay organized. For those in a hybrid model, you eliminate the factor of: “I forgot my planner in the school and now I don’t know what I have to do”. And for those that are in a face to face environment, we don’t know how the future looks like so It is always great to have them ready and teach them the procedures of using an online planner just in case you go 100% online.

There are a lot of apps out there that can be used to create an online planner, but we are going to share our favorite ones:

Wakelet

“Wakelet is a free visual content platform helping people, businesses, and academic institutions organize and curate their online information, so it is easier to find and share.”

With Wakelet you can curate all of the content and resources that you are teaching in a week. And what it is even better, you can organize it by days and subjects, giving your students all of the tools that they need to organize their time and enhance their self-regulation skills.

This is an example of how to use Wakelet as an online planner:

OneNote

OneNote is an online notebook. Whether you have a million ideas, a million things to do, Or a million things to remember, OneNote is the perfect app for capturing pretty much everything.

Being one of the most flexible apps that you can find, you can pretty much do whatever you want in OneNote. And of course, you can convert your OneNote into an online planner. There are many templates out there that you can get ideas from.

This is an example of how we use it:

You can customize your planner as much as you want. In our case, we decided to include a Moodmeter (SEL), a Weekly Goals section, and a Playlist section which helps us with our SEL and Playlist based approach.

Do you want to learn how to create your own template?

Genially

Genially, the tool for bringing your content to life. Create stunning presentations, infographics, and more in just seconds.

The best characteristic of Genially is the endless options that you have to create interactive elements for your graphics and this is what makes it one of our favorite apps to create online planners.

You can include your class resources and content inside of the planner thanks to the interactivity that it offers. It is also very visual and very engaging so planners are no longer boring, they are fun, colorful, and interactional.

Genially also has several online planners templates which will save you some time. Here there are two examples of these templates: