Our Story

In early 2010, Rod Hall, an elementary school teacher, was reflecting on the current school year, and planning how to leverage his summer break to best prepare for the next school year. He had two primary goals. The first, to be more effective in communicating with parents, to keep them "in the loop" on what was happening in the classroom. The second, to reduce time spent on weekly activities not directly tied to student learning.

In merging these goals, the idea of an online lesson planner came into focus. This would allow a much simpler way to handle lesson scheduling, with quick and easy methods to accommodate all the events that cause plans to change. And by allowing parents to view his weekly plans online, he would give them a powerful tool to know exactly what their children were learning.

Rod recruited his brother Jeff, a seasoned software developer, and what began as a weekend project soon became much more, and led to the official launch of planbook.com in August of 2010! Planbook quickly became the established market leader in online lesson planning, and we now have over 100,000 schools, 750,000 teachers, and one billion lessons in our system!

Take a look below to see how much we've changed in the past 10 years. And rest assured that we have many more features to go!