Naughty but nice and a lot quicker

Yes, I know I should have done them in August. But I didn't and I've just spent most of the day knocking out 10 schemes of work and a slightly ridiculous-sounding 300 lesson plans. It was blowing a gale outside and raining so that helped keep me indoors.

If you do the sums that's nearly 700 pages. Now, I can type pretty quickly but that's beyond even my old PA's capabilities in a single day. Luckily, there's the new version of my Scheme of Work and Lesson Plan tool which made the whole job a lot easier. Still clunky, but it does the job. (I'm hoping a nice young chap called Steve will help with a web version soon!)

You fill in all the bits and pieces related to the programme and lessons on one spreadsheet. Then some nice formulae copy the text into the right places on either a Scheme of Work sheet or to the appropriate one of 30 Lesson Plan sheets. Those sheets are set up to look reasonably good when printed on A4 and I can now run off whichever items I need as and when required.

In reality I usually find the notes I scrawl on the back of an envelope in the car a few minutes before the lesson starts are what I actually do but on occasions like next week, when someone is likely to come and watch the proceedings I'd better look a bit more organised.

Of course, if you happen to work for one of those institutions that say "You'll be downgraded if you don't use the standard institutional form" or it's on the wrong colour paper, even, in one place I've heard about  ". . . using anything other than Arial size 11" then you, like me will be very naughty. But it is nice and a lot quicker.

I've added a sample you can use to the More page of the webtools site if you're also running a bit late with this task.