It’s the first week of classes for me – and every year it seems that I make it more difficult by trying a new way to review previous material. On top of that, after 18 years of teaching my scribbled plans for a day are often not what actually ends up happening. For me a plan is somewhat organic. Ideas or different strategies can pop into my head changing, not what we are doing, but how we are doing it – sometimes on the fly. It has been a challenge to sometimes keep up with what actually happened so that I can perhaps try it again at a future date. Facing the challenge of updating my language classes through flipping and authentic activities things are not necessarily going ‘as they have been written’.

As I have mentioned before I am trying Evernote this year. I will admit that I am struggling with how to record and organize lesson plans. Do I do one note/plan per day per course? Do I save them by date or course? It is still a work in progress. But what I have found really useful is the ‘audio’ option on a note.

At the end of classes today I went back to my lesson plans. Instead of ‘manually’ trying to change my plan, and record in detail what happened I actually talked about it. For each class there was a rundown of what occurred. If I didn’t follow the plan exactly I noted it. Adjustments that might be needed for the future are noted. It is like my ‘report’ to myself on how the day went. I’m not  sure that it will be needed for every lesson plan every day – but when I’m trying to implement new things, I think my future self will find the comments to be useful.

Using audio for the lesson plan in the note is my way to capture what happens ‘organically’ in my class on a particular day. It’s a new twist in my lesson plans but one I hope will help in the future!

Colleen