Creating lesson plan templates

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Creating lesson plan templates

As educators, we spend a lot of time creating very similar documents, such as lesson plans, field trip permission forms, grade reports, or even classroom signage. Microsoft Word allows us to create template files that will interact with the Word frameworks, and can save us countless hours of searching for files, and eliminate the fear of accidentally saving over your coveted template file. Let's take a look at the template file we'll be creating in this video. Here in Microsoft Word, when you first open the application, it brings you to the Template Browser. Most people will select a Blank document, or choose from one of the Microsoft Office-provided templates. We will be creating personal templates which can be access under the Personal tab.

>> If you don't see the Personal tab on your version of Office, that's okay. This tab is only displayed once we actually have personal templates created. >> Here, I have my science lesson plan. When I click on the Science Lesson Plan template, it opens up a Blank science lesson plan. I'm now able to construct my science lesson plan, and either print it or save it somewhere else on my desktop. Let's go ahead and close back out of this file so that we can talk about how we're going to create this template in Microsoft Word. Let's go a head and open the Exercise Files. And under chapter two we have two files available to us.

One is the science lesson plan starting point and one is the science lesson plan template that we'll be creating. Please note that even though the both of these have the Microsoft Word icon attached to them, they are in fact different document types. Over there in the type section you can see that our starting plan is a Microsoft Word document or DOCX File. The lesson plan template we are going to create is a DOTX File. When you create a DOTX file it's designed to be a starting point not a final document. And I am going to show you how to organize DOTX Files.

So you can access them in the template browser that's built into Microsoft Word. Let's go ahead and open up the Microsoft Word document by clicking on science, lesson plan, starting. Here we have a very basis lesson plan that's built into Word. It has some headers, some basic information about the unit and lesson, objectives, standards, an outline for the lesson and uses the five E's to organize the content. It also has a section for homework. A reflection in plan and also uses some differentiation tools. We're going to use this lesson plan to create a template.

To do so we're going to go to File, Export on the left hand side, we're going to choose change File type and then on the right hand side select Template. Directly below we're going to click Save As. Which opens up the save as dialog box. You can see that Microsoft Word has already changed the file type to a Word template. At this point, I have a chance to title my Word template. I don't need the word starting there, so I'm going to go ahead and backspace out so it just says Science Lesson Plan. If I save this file right now, it'll add it to our Exercise Files, and that's not what we'd like.

We want to make sure that Microsoft Office can find this file when it first starts up in the template browser. To do that, we need to put it in the Custom Templates Folder. The custom templates folder for most Microsoft Office installs will be located under Libraries. Under Documents in the Custom Office Templates Folder. Anything saved in the Custom Office Templates Folder will be automatically added to the template browser when you first start Microsoft Word. I'm going to go and click Save. Let's go ahead and close out of Microsoft Office by clicking the X in the upper right hand corner so that we can double check to see if that template really has been saved.

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