So, as you may imagine I read an awful lot about educational technology. The fact of the matter is there is a lot to read, but I am utterly despondent by the massive administrative clutter that obscures the central issue: teaching kids by engaging them in the classroom. That theme comes up again and again with the teachers I speak with about what matters most to them. This is obscured by certain administrative mandates–but at PlansForUs this is not obscured. We are about simplifying and streamlining collaborative lesson planning.

I found this piece recently entitled “The transformation of educational publishing: the emergence and growth of a teacher-centered, learning-object environment”. It was written in 2002 and is essentially a puff piece for a company called OnCourse. This particular quote got to me:

Provide exchange services–Extensive exchange forums to make collections, supported by turnkey lesson plans, that allow school, district, regional, and national peer sharing across education resources. Exchanges require a quality control review system and an extensive rights management and tracking system (mentioned above) in order to consistently audit usage among all educator/consumers who offer collections across the school network. Exchanges promote a “Build Once–Use Many” environment to create and exchange teacher-created resources contextualized to actual classroom conditions.

Now OnCourse may be a great company and some of the user testaments seem to be really excited about the program. It sounds like a great program in how it synthesizes all of the required formats into a lesson plan. It acknowledges that you do not want to repeat work, but no teaching strategy is universally good. Every strategy is contextualized to a single classroom, not just actual classroom conditions.

Come on. Teaching, while it no doubt has certain requirements, is about connecting ideas to students. In fact a classroom is composed of multiple students with varied learning styles. A lesson planning system, installed by Oracle, costing $20,000-$60,000 a year and consisting of a cascading series of drop down menus does not inspire a student and it certainly will not inspire a teacher.

PlansForUs is a growing community of educators. This community turns a basic web word processor into a powerful idea connector. That’s it. We are not planning to add anything to our product that doesn’t make finding good ideas easier. We do not have a huge number of options. We are an idea exchange tuned to support teachers. Join us and spread the word. There are 3,500,000 K-12 in the US, 8 million K-12 teachers in english speaking countries and 65 million K-12 educators worldwide. There are myriad connections between many of you, PlansForUs is a platform to find them.

PlansForUs aims to get as many of these teachers on board as possible. Does that mean PlansForUs will be immensely successful? Yes it does. But imagine what a positive force we can be if we turn our earnings into funding for teacher driven causes. Teachers change the world. PlansForUs provides an opportunity to aggregate and intensify your world changing voice.

by Tyler, CEO