You can write plans on Educa to set goals for individuals or groups and for lesson plans. You can link plans into stories, teacher portfolio posts, forms and other plans to provide context and to demonstrate your process.  And because you can link multiple stories to a plan and link frameworks, you can use plans to tell a larger story of a child's journey around a theme or narrative.

All plans are based on templates, which can be set up by your Site Administrator. The template lays out the fields and labels, as well as setting visibility - whether the plan is visible to families or not, whether some fields are not visible to families, etc.

You can link teachers to your plan, giving them permission to view and comment on your plan. Get in touch with Educa Support if you want teachers to edit other teacher's plans, as we can turn on the ability for linked teachers to edit plans. This makes Planning a great collaboration tool for teachers.

Inside a plan you can attach resources, link to any curriculum, child stories and other plans.

Open Planning from the Tools tab and select Create Plan. Start by selecting the template you wish to use. 

Then select the child/children the plan is for. If you select multiple children, they will all be attached to a single plan and all the related family members will be able to view and comment on the single plan. 

Next, link the teachers who you want to give access to your plan. Linked teachers will also be able to edit the plan if you have turned on this site setting with Educa Support.

Write your title and provide a short summary of what the plan is about. This information will appear on stories when plans are linked. 

You can then fill out your custom fields in the text boxes provided. You'll be advised whether each field is visible to parents. 

Before saving your work, you can attach resources, link to curriculum outcomes, child stories and other plans.

Once you have finished writing your plan you can choose to Draft or Publish your plan. Once Published, parents will be able to view the plan on their child's profile, but you can still Edit the plan if you need to record ongoing reflections about progress. 

Published plans can be downloaded and printed out, and notifications can be sent to parents.

Creating plans using table templates works just like those plans you create using vertical templates. The only difference is how you add information into your custom fields. 

If you've created your own table template, you'll need to start by Adding a Row. If you're using an Educa standard table template, rows will already be set. 

To add information to a cell, you simply click the cell and write your information in the pop up text box. Click Ok to save your changes. Attach stories or plans to specific cells by using the assigned buttons within each cell.

You can change the styling of each cell to a 'Header' style, which will help differentiate specific cells. 

Rows can be deleted using the bin icon on the right of each row. Alternatively you can add additional rows using the Add New Row option at the bottom of the table.