The 5 Minute Lesson Plan is now available in digital format!
Following a beta testing group, and after 14 months of planning, I am pleased to offer a finished product. .
With over 431,912 views on The TES and downloaded in over 140 countries worldwide, The original 5-Minute Lesson Plan is now available online.
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In this blog you will read where to find the digital version and try it out for yourself; the tool is also explained in detail, with a simple video demonstration. The full-user version is explained with a range of screenshots and FAQs at the bottom of this blog.
Announcing!
It’s finally here — The 5 Minute Lesson Plan championed by @TeacherToolkit has been adapted into an interactive online tool for teachers, thanks to the hard-working people at Angel Solutions in Liverpool. Visit www.5MinuteLessonPlan.co.uk where you can try out the FREE version which allows you to create an online plan and print the lesson plan as a PDF file.
Just click the Try It Button and remember, it should only take 5 minutes to complete!
Credit: www.netformx.com
The Digital 5MinPlan:
The whole idea of this digital tool is to save teachers time and to make planning even easier. I’m aware that there are a number of 5 Minute Lesson Plan resources available online now, but most of these are Word or Powerpoint templates that can take a lot of time to format. Other resources usually involve printing out templates and filling them in by hand and that’s ideally what the 5-Minute Lesson Plan was designed to do. Since I first tweeted the plan during an Ofsted observation, the idea has gone viral and has sprouted up in over 138 countries (and counting) worldwide! Since then, I have seen countless modifications of the idea, Excel files and mail-merge versions, as well as paper-based plans with thoughts etched all across the paper! Spending too much time writing onto The 5-Minute Lesson Plan defeats the purpose of reducing workload, as opposed to this digital version which will make lesson planning even easier.
With this tool, The 5 Minute Lesson Plan has become entirely digital gives a consistently well-formatted end result. Simply type the content into each section and within minutes you’ve got a neatly laid out lesson plan. My advice; think about your lesson plan before adding content.
Hopefully you’ll find www.5minutelessonplan.co.uk simple to use. The tool guides you through the usual 5 Minute Lesson Plan format step-by-step. If you’re not sure what to put in a section, simply click the ‘i’ icon in the title and an explanation will pop up. You can even jump to a different stage of the plan if you prefer to fill it out in a different order — just click on the section you want to edit in the image at the bottom of the tool.
A very simple and quick video demonstration is shown below …
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Even Better If:
Wait, it gets better! Angel Solutions have also developed a FULL version of the tool that incorporates extra features to make teachers’ lives easier. The most notable difference with this is the opportunity for teachers to login and save multiple plans in an editable format. This means you can build up a private portfolio of all your lessons in one easily-accessible online database. You can save a plan part-way through and go back to it later, or edit existing plans and then use them for different lessons. Plus, we have added features like a search function and the ability to organise your plans by name, description or date.
The FREE version is free to test in detail, but the FULL version of The 5 Minute Lesson Plan is only £25 for a whole year for any teacher. Add to that all the extra features that are in the pipeline for the coming months — like cloning existing plans offered in The 5 Minute Series (now with 29 different models), sharing options and support for additional lesson plan templates.
There’s also the option for schools to purchase a Site Licence to cover all of their staff, allowing them all to create, save and build up a portfolio of lesson plans. So, if you and other teachers in your school appreciate using this tool, why not ask your school to request the Site Licence option instead? This is easy to arrange. The 5 Minute Lesson Plan digital tool has been built within an existing school toolkit called Perspective, which most schools in England already have access to in a Lite version through their Local Authorities. Schools can easily purchase a 5 Minute Lesson Plan Site Licence as an addition to their existing Perspective package. Schools could also choose to upgrade Perspective further and unlock even more school improvement features that are on offer to them.
Try Now:
Interested in the subscription, then get in touch here and don’t forget to read the Frequently Asked Questions I receive below.
If not, click the Try It button below!
FAQs:
Hear me talk about The 5-Minute Lesson Plan here in a podcast. Over the past 6 years I have been asked many questions about The 5-Minute Plan. Here, you can read the most frequent below:
- Is The 5 Minute Plan designed for Ofsted inspections?
- No, the 5-Minute Plan was never designed for Ofsted inspections and was not designed to belittle the cognitive process used in the lesson planning. It was originally designed for new teachers to the profession, to help formalise the process needed to improve practice in the classroom – to focus on learning, rather than the activity – whilst aiming to reduce planning time that so many teachers report as a burden in their early years.
- Do Ofsted accept its use?
- Yes! But remember, it was never designed for this purpose and Ofsted do not expect to see a lesson plan! “Do not focus on the lesson structure at the expense of its content or the wide range of other evidence about how well children are learning in the school.” You can see evidence here of the 5-Minute Lesson Plan appearing in a second Ofsted report. See the moment here when I used it for an Ofsted inspection.
- Will The 5 Minute Lesson Plan help me achieved Outstanding teaching?
- No! A lesson plan is only a tiny part of the enormous range of components needed to become a ‘good’ teacher. It is also not my place, to define to you what is a ‘good teacher’ and what makes an outstanding lesson. Do bear in mind, lessons are not graded in many schools and one-off judgements should never be provided.
- Can anyone use it?
- Yes, feedback from many teachers working in many sectors and in many countries, report that the format can be applied to any given context. It was created to reduce planning time and give teachers the time they needed back! To provide every teacher with a *suggested overview of what is important in the classroom. To place the focus on learning and not the activity.
- How did it all start?
- The original plan was designed by @JohnBayley1 and @Miss_Snuffy before being handed over to @TeacherToolkit in 2008. What you see today, is the result of years of modifications, sharing and tweeting the results. This was the moment it really kicked off, despite @TeacherToolkit using the plan in schools and online 4 years prior to this moment.
- Where can I contact others who are using it?
- Easy, search the hashtag on Twitter and see the hundreds of tweeters and photo examples.
The 5-Minute Lesson Plan is not for everyone, but many do claim it helps reduce the burden on planning and help them re-think the process of planning. Why not give the original paper version a trial?
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