Getting Started

Open Planner offers a lot of powerful functionality, which can be a bit overwhelming to the new user. This page intends to help new users speed the learning curve, and take full advantage of the site's features. Also visit the help section.

Here are some key ideas and tips to help you get started:

1. Before you can create or edit curriculum content, you need to either JOIN a team, or START a team. Here's a bit more...
   

1. Joining an existing team: Join a team by clicking the "subscribe" link when viewing the team listings. Since our site launched in May 2006, a wide diversity of teams has formed. Most of these teams are still just beginning the serious work of building educational resources. Some of these teams are "open" in that anyone can instantly subscribe, whereas others have adopted "moderated" or "closed" subscription models. When you join a moderated team, the team manager must first approve your subscription. If you wish to join a closed team, you should contact the team manager, listed in the team home page.

2. Starting a new team: Start a new team by clicking the "start a team" link on the left menu in your dashboard. Whenever practical, new members are strongly encouraged to work with existing teams. For example, if there's already a 9th grade Physics team, and you want to build 9th grade Physics resources, you should try to join forces rather than split off on your own, unless there are significant reasons for creating a parallel version of a curriculum. In the case described, imagine two colleagues with very different pedagogical approaches to the 9th grade physics curriculum...while eventually it might be more practical for these teachers to manage separate teams, if these divergent viewpoints never attempted an initial collaboration, a valuable conversation would be lost.
2. A team has multiple purposes: to host discussion, to publish educational resources, and to organize people in a common effort.
1. Team forums: Make a forum post by joining a team, and clicking "post forum topic" in the team forums. You can also reply to a post by clicking "reply" under an existing post. Forums are for informal discussion that needs to occur around group process and design approach, and for support questions regarding the curriculum and/or resources posted in a team's project pages. Each team has it's own dedicated discussion forum, and only subscribed members of a team may post in its forums.
2. Project pages (book pages): Add a project page by clicking "add book page" on the team home page. You must be subscribed to a team to add book pages to the team's project pages. Project pages are for publishing the team's organized educational resources, or the "project" that others will presumably benefit from. Project pages are hierarchical in structure, with "parent" and "child" relationships between pages. Add a child page by clicking "add child page" at the bottom of an existing project page. Change the location of a page in the hierarchy by changing the "parent" in the editing tab of that page.
3. Organizing people: Subscription settings and authoring privileges.
1. Subscription settings: Enabling email notifications. You can receive emails of each new post in a team by clicking "my subscription" from the team home page, and enabling email notifications. With this enabled, you will recieve an email with a trimmed version of each new post (forum, comment, book page) submitted in the team and a link back to the URL of the post. This is especially important for team managers, who may wish to serve as an editor or quality reviewer as content is added to a team.
2. Editiing privileges: Granting the "primary author" role. By default, subscribers are able to post new content, but they can only edit their OWN posts. Group subscribers can be granted editing privileges on ALL team documents by the team manager by clicking "# subscribers" in the left menu of the team home page, and selecting the "set member editing privileges" tab, and checking boxes next to the appropriate users.
   
3. Planning teamplates can save you time and help others understand your work. Create a new planning template by clicking "create planning template in the left sidebar of the team home page. Curriculum design is a creative process that is difficult to proceduralize. There are diverse, structured approaches to organizing thinking and information. Our site is attempts to honor this diversity while encouraging consistency and uniformity within a team's planning efforts. This is especially important if others are actually going to try to use the stuff you've created!