Lesson Maker Pro vs Planboard

Lesson Maker Pro is a web app for teachers to plan lessons, organize a teaching week, and create classroom materials. Its weekly planner is a drag-and-drop board for placing lessons into a bell schedule and switching days. The Teaching Assistant can brainstorm ideas, draft lesson plans, suggest activities, and discuss teaching questions. Plans can align with Common Core, NGSS, and state standards drawn from a catalog of more than 455,000 standards. The app generates worksheets, handouts, assessments, student notes, teacher guides, graphic organizers, infographics, card sheets, and presentations. Materials can be downloaded as PDF, DOCX, or PPTX, or exported to Google Docs, Slides, Forms, and Classroom. Free accounts include sub plans that can be printed or shared by private link. Student accounts, rosters, and student data are not needed; Digital Experiences also need no student accounts, installs, or app, and their links work for two weeks. The free plan allows five generated lessons and one unit plan monthly, ten standalone materials monthly, and 25 Teaching Assistant messages monthly. Pro costs $7.99 a month, billed annually.

Planboard is Chalk’s lesson-planning tool for teachers building and organizing units and lessons for students. Teachers can create, edit, and share lesson plans, then arrange lessons, subjects, and semesters in a timetable. Plans can include curriculum standards, photos, and files. The service is available on the web, iOS, and Android, and its mobile app syncs with the web version. The free Planboard plan costs nothing. Chalk Gold adds features such as custom colors, lesson search, and Google Classroom integration. Gold users and teachers at schools subscribed to Instruction Solution can also export timetables to Google Calendar and attach Google Drive files; free users cannot share lessons to Google Classroom unless their school has that subscription. Chalk Teams is for teaching groups of 2–10 and includes Gold features and shared lesson collaboration. Public lesson links can make lessons and attachments available for the configured time frame. Chalk says users can view and export their data, request account and data deletion, and download lesson plans.