Digital Lesson Planner: Google Sheets + GitHub Sync
Challenge / Context
My school follows an 8-day rotating schedule, with only six of my classes meeting on any given day. Keeping track of exactly where each class stood in the curriculum — and communicating that clearly to myself, substitutes, or administrators — was difficult with a standard week-based planner. I wanted a single system that organized full lesson plans (objectives, essential questions, teaching points, and activities) and could be reviewed at a glance as a clean, easy-to-read calendar rather than a dense spreadsheet.
Approach
I built a Google Sheets planner with each row representing a day of the rotation through January, and columns for every part of a lesson plan — essential questions, learning goals, direct instruction, activities, and closure. I then wrote a Google Apps Script that syncs the spreadsheet to a GitHub repository, and used GitHub Pages to automatically publish the data as a read-only calendar website. I also built in AI-generated content in certain cells — for example, generating a plain-language student summary based on the lesson details entered in other columns.
To build this, I learned to write and authenticate Google Apps Script, generate and manage a GitHub access token, structure a GitHub repository and enable GitHub Pages, and write the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that renders the calendar view — all through iterative problem-solving in conversation with Gemini and Claude.
Design Rationale
This project applies systems thinking to my own instructional workflow, not just to student-facing content: rather than maintaining separate planning documents and separate communication about pacing, one input (the spreadsheet) automatically produces an accurate, always-current, human-readable output (the calendar). Building in AI-generated summaries reduced repetitive documentation work while keeping the underlying lesson data as the single source of truth. The result mirrors the kind of backward-design thinking I bring to student-facing lessons — starting from what the end user (myself, a substitute, or an administrator) actually needs to see — applied instead to the infrastructure behind my teaching.
Outcome / Reflection
I now have one editable planner that automatically becomes a public, easy-to-navigate teaching calendar with no manual re-entry or duplicate documentation. Beyond the practical time savings, this project pushed me to learn tools well outside typical classroom-teacher territory — Apps Script, API authentication, Git, and front-end code — and reflects the kind of comfort with connecting disparate tools into one coherent workflow that I’d bring to building and maintaining course infrastructure at scale.
