Create a Lesson Plan Template

Collaborate using OneNote Staff Notebooks

To help build ideas for your lesson plan and collaborate with other teachers, utilize OneNote Staff Notebooks. OneNote Staff Notebooks are designed for group collaboration, allowing teachers across departments to work together. In the collaboration space, you can create and develop lesson plans across grades. OneNote Staff Notebooks also include a content library for things like policies and procedures and have integration with Microsoft Forms so you can include quizzes in your lesson plan documents.

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When creating lesson plans, it can be difficult to account for your student’s needs. Students may struggle with new material, others may be ahead of the curve, and some may need additional support. OneNote Staff Notebooks can account for fluctuations in students’ performance and can be used as a private resource to house Individualized Education Programs (IEP) for students who need specialized instruction.

Create a digital lesson plan template

Organizing your digital lesson plan into a premade template will conserve energy and time, tracking all the components you need to include. When outlining your lesson plan, organize the top row by the days of the week. Under the first column, you can include lesson plan components, such as the following:

• Topic: This is the subject matter for the lesson. For example, if you’re teaching a world history course, is today’s lesson on Mesopotamia, Egypt, or Greece?
• Introduction: Think of a fun way to introduce a topic. Clever and engaging introductions help students become motivated and enthusiastic to learn about a topic.
• Standards: Educators need to follow state and Common Core standards, which detail what students should know by the end of each school grade. Click the Insert tab on the ribbon and save a link to state and common standards to reference while crafting your lesson plan.
• Objectives: Learning objectives are clearly defined goals you expect your students to achieve by the end of the lesson. Make sure these goals are attainable and correspond with state and Common Core standards. When formatting the objectives section of your digital lesson plan, you can include to-do tags to create a checklist. After your class instruction, review how your lesson went. Did you achieve all your listed learning objectives? Check off objectives you completed and review objectives that your class was dissatisfactory in. To take your objective organization further, you can also categorize your learning objective to-do tags. Click the second down arrow beneath to-do-tags and create a new, custom tag. Use different symbols to distinguish categories for learning objectives like memorization or analysis.
• Instruction method/activities: The instruction method or activities you use for a topic will determine how students will learn, retain, and understand a topic. When crafting activities and how to present the information, consider how much time you will take to explain concepts and apply information. There are plenty of interactive activities to try out—you can have students journal to reflect on new concepts, play an interactive group game, and group them in pairs to discuss ideas from the lesson.
• Assessment/wrap-up: Determine how you will evaluate how well your students mastered your learning objectives. Assessments can include quizzes, exams, presentations, group assignments, and even class participation. To integrate quiz creation into your notebook on OneNote, use the insert tab and select forms. From there, you can include any quizzes you created in Microsoft Forms and save them in a separate section of your notebook.

For additional digital lesson plan templates, you can use Microsoft Create. Microsoft Create has stunning templates for Microsoft 365 products for all your education needs.

OneNote’s features make creating digital lesson plans easy, so your students can excel in the classroom.