I love the beautiful, customizable, colorful paper planners that many of my fellow teachers share around Back-to-School time, and sometimes I wish I had one too, but the truth is that I can never go back to a life of using a paper lesson planner. I started using a digital lesson planner well before 2020 forced us all into a digital age of teaching, and since then I have never wanted to go back! Here’s why:

1. You will never forget or lose it somewhere

When I had my first teaching job, I lived just 5 minutes down the road from my school. I got to school really early to get ready for the day, and I can’t tell you how many times I ran back home again before school because I was always forgetting something. And that “something” was very often my lesson plan book! I was lost without it. I refer to my lesson plans multiple times a day, so a physical lesson planner just didn’t work for me and my forgetful brain!

2. You can access it anywhere and on any device.

This one only works if you use a cloud-based planner. When I decided to go digital, I started by using a free digital planner template that I found on TpT. It used Microsoft Word and was saved on my school desktop computer/flash drive. But… I still had to remember to bring the flash drive home with me to prep for my future lessons!

After forgetting my flash drive too many times (and growing weary of e-mailing the doc so I wouldn’t forget), I finally set to work creating my own digital lesson plan template on Google Sheets. The beauty of using Google Sheets is that you can access it anywhere, on any device, at any time! I have the Sheets app on my phone, so I can even look at my plans from my phone in a pinch. No more saving, emailing, or downloading– all of my hard work lesson planning is saved automatically and across all devices. Now that I have “mom brain” on top of my usual forgetfulness, I am definitely never going back!

3. It’s risk-free customizable

I have a hard time committing to one design or color choice for an entire year, so I love that I can use Google Sheets and change the font/colors/style whenever I want. Right now I’m using a rosy color scheme, but in the past I’ve used brights, neutrals, and cool colors. And if I decide that I hate it, I can just reset or change it!

4. It’s mess-free

Teachers are constantly adapting lessons as our students learn (or don’t master) content. There’s nothing I hate more than creating beautiful lesson plans and then having to scratch it all in order to pivot and do something totally different. With a digital lesson planner, it’s as easy as deleting a cell or copy/pasting into a new week! And with Google Sheets, you can easily check your revision history to find a previous plan that you created.

5. It’s easy to collaborate

This is one of my FAVORITE features of planning digitally! Google makes it so easy to add collaborators to a document, and I can’t think of a better feature as an ESL teacher than to be able to share my live, ever-changing lesson plans with my co-teachers. My co-teachers and I share our reading groups, oral language lessons, reading levels, scope & sequence, and so many other things digitally so that we can collaborate better and save valuable time co-planning. Communication is key to an effective co-teaching relationship, and digital lesson plans make timely communication a breeze!

6. It saves you time

There are so many cool tricks you can do with Google Sheets if you know where to look. In my digital weekly lesson planner, I found a calendar trick that allows you to update each week’s dates with two clicks on your mousepad! I know it sounds crazy to be so excited about this tiny thing, but I am a firm believer that every second counts during the school day, and I don’t want to waste any time doing mindless things if I don’t have to. If you want my template with this fun trick, you can get it here. If you know of any other amazing time-saving hacks, please tell me! I am dying to know!

I truly have such a 😍 love-love-love relationship with my digital lesson planner. I share it with all my co-workers because I know they will love it too!

If you want my tried-and-true digital weekly lesson plan templates, you can get them here! And feel free to poke around my shop for other fun teacher resources on Google Apps (like Google Sheets) to make your planning period more efficient and meaningful. I love sharing the resources that work well for me!