PLANalyst 1.1

PLANalyst is a tool that helps teachers and trainers work smarter by helping them to plan better.

The newest version of PLANalyst, to be unveiled at the Fall CUE conference in October, contains an enhanced database of teaching strategies. PLANalyst provides screens on which you can describe your learners and your content. The software looks at these descriptions and then chooses techniques that might be useful to you from a database of dozens of strategies. Each suggestion includes pointers to articles from teacher journals and ERIC documents which provide more detail on how you can incorporate the strategies into your teaching.

PLANalyst 1.1 contains three separate parts:

Events as Building Blocks

Using PLANalyst requires one to think about teaching as a sequence of separate events. These events are the basic building blocks of a lesson. An example of a typical event would be the act of providing the definition of a concept being taught. Another event would be the segment of a lesson during which learners practice what they've learned.

Each event has the following characteristics:

  1. It has some instructional or practical purpose

  2. It takes up some amount of time.

  3. It exists within a sequence of other events... building on what preceded it and paving the way for what follows.

Every instructor has experienced a bad lesson or two. Why? Lessons fail when you:

  1. include things in them that don't have some reason for being there,

  2. fail to plan for the amount of time things take,

  3. omit a critical step within the teaching process or do things out of order.

PLANalyst helps you to avoid such mistakes.

PLANalyst has been tested by teachers at the elementary, secondary and college levels. It is published by SuperSchool Software in Long Beach, California. Early in 1996 it will be bundled with the second edition of the Prentice-Hall book Instructional Design, by Tillman J. Regan and Patricia L. Smith.

Authored by:
Bernie Dodge,
Professor of Educational Technology
Contact Information : bdodge@mail.sdsu.edu
Last Revised September 14,1995
URL: http://edweb.sdsu.edu/Open_House/OpenHouse.html