Unit planners

At my last workshop in Barcelona I mentioned the idea of creating unit planners for IB diploma courses. Teachers from MYP schools knew all about this but the majority didn't. It is not compulsory for diploma schools to have a system that requires teachers to produce detailed plans of their teaching year but it is something that will be looked at during the 5 year review so it's probably advisable. The IB have produced a variety of templates that can be used, they all contain the same basic information but different levels of detail. Schools don't have to use these templates but whatever system is used should be along the same lines. In my opinion there is no point in creating unit planners that are going to sit in a drawer or, only slightly better, on our file server. They should be part of a database so they can be analysed and organised in different ways. There are several systems that will do this, Managebac and Rubicon Atlas are two possibilities. At my school we are going for a home grown alternative as an add-on to our school management system w4, created by Mirek Scoczek (the brains) and myself (the insider).

My lesson plans on this website contain most of the details of a unit planner: course content, activities, resources, labs, TOK, NOS and assessments. All that needs to be done is for the relevant parts to be pulled off into the correct field of the database. I have played around a bit and it's quite easy to simply drag and drop from the webpage so this is what I am aiming to do. Subscribers can of course do this as well if you want. When I'm done I will publish my unit planners here so you can see what mine look like.