In early 2010, Rod Hall, an elementary school teacher,
was reflecting on the current school year, and planning how to
leverage his summer break to best prepare for the next school
year. He had two primary goals. The first, to be more effective
in communicating with parents, to keep them "in the loop" on
what was happening in the classroom. The second, to reduce time
spent on weekly activities not directly tied to student
learning.
In merging these goals, the idea of an online lesson
planner came into focus. This would allow a much simpler way to
handle lesson scheduling, with quick and easy methods to
accommodate all the events that cause plans to change. And by
allowing parents to view his weekly plans online, he would give
them a powerful tool to know exactly what their children were
learning.
Rod recruited his brother Jeff, a seasoned software
developer, and what began as a weekend project soon became much
more, and led to the official launch of planbook.com in August
of 2010! Planbook quickly became the established market leader
in online lesson planning, and we now have over 100,000
schools, 750,000 teachers, and one billion lessons in our
system!
Take a look below to see how much we've changed in the
past 10 years. And rest assured that we have many more features
to go!
Planbook
