So I have been pondering this a while now and probably will continue to ponder it. What is the best way for teachers to find relevant lesson plan content?

The current model is a search model. Google goes out and assigns PageRank value to the myriad lesson planning sites and based on your search term lists them for your clicking pleasure. Then you, the searcher, begin a search for a plan that is relevant to you based on your particular criteria within these sites. Sometimes you constrain the search based on certain traditional hierarchies (grades, subjects) and sometimes the search is done through a series of search terms. It’s an alright process, I mean it’s the best we’ve got for now, but there must be a better way.

Search is awesome, without Google the web would be a real bummer to navigate. I remember when we first got Internet at my house. I was in fifth grade, I think, and my family had signed us up for the Compuserve service and I would spend a couple minutes reading about cars. After those few minutes, because it wasn’t easy to find what little else was on the Internet, I left and did other stuff. I would say that with the advent of Google I probably spent 4x as much time on the Internet. Interestingly enough my patterns have changed, now I find 60% of what interests me via blog links, Facebook, Last.FM or other communities, which leads me to…

What if you just want to connect with a lesson plan that fits your need? A lesson plan to inspire your next days class. It seems that search falls short. The reason it falls short, is because you are seeking inspiration, not just information. Inspiration is derived by knowing the backstory. It comes when there is a dialogue around a product’s use. Inspiration is found in a community. Communities can append a piece of information with all of that metadata that allows you to envision a plan’s usage in your classroom.

That’s why PlansForUs is built as a social lesson planning platform. We are not a site where people dump lesson plans and a few people pop a couple ratings on a plan. Why was Dan Myer’s lesson plan on measurement downloaded 6,000 times. Well in the first place it was good; actually my wife did a plan similar to Dan’s to teach her 1st graders and it met with similar learning success. In the second place, his blog gave the plan context. Now can every plan have the contextual layers that Dan provides in his blog entry, maybe not. However, a community interacting with a plan and a site tracking these interactions and visualizing these interactions can build those contextual layers.

PlansForUs is a lesson planning tool built on the engine of community and connection. Our motto is “creation through collaboration”, it’s simple but if we can achieve our motto then teaching will no doubt benefit.

So if you are a regular reader of my blog (don’t answer that) you will notice a new feature on the right hand bar, just below the MyBlogLog widget. Yes folks that’s my Last.FM music tracker widget.

Right now the music you see is mine, as we grow the company and consolidate into one location that widget will reflect the music being played by the PlansForUs team.

Here is what I think is cool about Last.FM. Finding new music is fun, Last.FM creates a new way for people to find new music that they may like and it requires almost no effort for me to share what I am listening to with my loyal readers. I just play the music and Last.FM broadcasts it wherever I have installed the widget. At this point it is on my Facebook profile and my MySpace profile. I hope to be able to add it to my Ning profile soon.

Anyway, I hope that you will find some interesting tracks.

So this weekend my wife and I celebrated our 1st anniversary. We celebrated in upstate New York with our parents and it was an altogether awesome weekend. A weekend where we got to reflect on our year as a married couple.

Sunday morning found my father on the porch reading “The Zeus Trip”, by Jennifer Conlin in the NY Times. At the conclusion of the article, he looked up and remarked that lesson plans were everywhere and as such, how could PlansForUs catalogue and organize these ideas from outside the teaching ecosystem.
An interesting question indeed. He’s absolutely right, there are a ton of interesting teaching experiences happening outside of the school system, but how could you incentivize those people to post their ideas, in lesson plan form, at PlansForUs. I am not sure.

However, the other place this article took me seems to be more feasible. Teaching is happening everywhere; what if our teachers began to share life experiences as lesson plans on PlansForUs. What if, rather than a writer for the NY Times, Jennifer was a teacher. How cool would it be for her to construct a lesson plan around her trip through Greece. And how cool would it be for Jennifer to connect to other teachers who had travelled in Greece and collaboratively build an even more detailed and granular lesson plan.

This can happen at PlansForUs. We will be launching user profiles soon. These profiles will be used to connect you with others who share experiences. Perhaps you graduated from the same Masters program, maybe you grew up in the same city, or you connect through a travel experience. Building connections through shared experience and then utilizing those connections to collaboratively build engaging lessons is what the PlansForUs platform is all about.

Please suggest any fields that you would like to see in the user profile. You can leave suggestions in the comments section, we will carefully consider all of your suggestions.