Music Teacher Digital Planner & How I Use It
When I tell you I live and die by my iPad Pro, I’m not kidding.
I bought my iPad Pro in the Fall 2021, mostly because I wanted to use ForScore to help me manage 5 different ensembles worth of music. I can write another time about the wonders of ForScore (if you don’t have it, it’s a MUST), but today I need to tell you about how a digital planner changed the teaching game for me.
When I got back from maternity leave in October 2022, I knew I really wanted to streamline things. Despite my digital tendencies, I am a paper planner girl. The problem is, because I have so many things going on, I would either forget my planner or forget to write things down….so then what is the point of a planner? At this point, I was already using ForScore for all of my music, so it had to come with me anyway. Enter digital planning.
I bought a regular planner (not teacher) from HappyDownloads, which was great! If you need a personal planner, I highly recommend them. Did I do actual lesson planning in it? No - it’s not a lesson planner. But what I DID do kept my gradebook the most organized it’s ever been. Because this digital planner had a completely hyperlinked calendar (I could click a day and it would go to a unique daily planning page), I could save things to a particular day. I would import my seating chart PDFs into the my teaching “day” and then make notes on them during classes for rehearsal etiquette grades. When I got to sight reading testing or anything individually assessed, I put the rubrics in my day as well.
This allowed me to do a couple things: I now had a streamlined way to grab weekly grades for rehearsal etiquette & I knew what I graded, who I graded, and WHEN.
I didn’t have to worry about losing my paper seating charts with my notes or solo audition rubrics. Everything was right there with just a click of a calendar! I showed some friends and their mind was blown, so I knew I needed to make a music teacher specific one. I plan a different way for rehearsals and I already had my scores on my iPad, so only having to haul ONE thing would be ideal. I knew my marching band friends had the same issue. Enter the Music Teacher Digital Planner.
I walked through the planner here, but let me show you some of my favorite pages!
Weekly planning pages are laid out more like a traditional teacher planner. I took inspiration from my Plum Paper layout that I would customize every year (I’m a vertical girl). Daily planning has an hourly schedule layout. If you’re like me, you’re not teaching the same classes every day, so you can easily write in your schedule here. 4 different “to do” lists (Priority, Should Do, Copy/Print, and Email) help keep your top to dos organized
Classic teacher pages include:
Year at a Glance
Rosters
Gradebook
Seating Chart
Contact Log
Brain Dump
I put my paper concert planning information into this planning and I am HERE for it. The amount of times I’ve forgotten at least 1 of these things is embarrassing😬. These pages go in 3 separate phases: Pre-planning (building, A/V, etc), music planning, and actual concert planning (order, speeches, etc).
Secondary music teachers, especially, are the kings and queens of field trips and overnighters. I’ve been trip coordinator multiple times and put all my favorite things in this section. There are a lot of pages for a reason - trip planning is a lot of work 🫠.
Marching Band and Music Directors are special people. And by special, I mean we’re not normal 😂. We need a special set of planning resources and now I can have them all in one space! Each section has to do list pages (priority, future) and rehearsal planning pages. Marching band has a drill planner and Musical has a casting sheet.
When I was directing high school show choir at my last school, my dot grid notebook was my LIFE. If you’ve ever had to choreograph or place students, you know how useful that layout is. This is why I included 3 different styles of note pages: ruled/lined, grid, and dot grid.
This planner is dated July-June and has my favorite feature - hyperlinking. Touch a week day, land in your daily planning pages for the day. Touch where it says “weekly”, get to your weekly lesson plans!