PurpleTrail Academic Planners Review

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Academic year planners are designed with a focus on teachers and students. These planners are formatted to organize school assignments and lesson plans. PurpleTrail custom planners are perfect if you want to create an academic year planner to meet your student planner or teacher planner needs.

What are academic year planners?

Academic year planners are 12-month planners that usually start in July or August. These planners help students and teachers organize assignments by subject and day of the week.  

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What makes an academic planner unique?

Most academic planners for students are designed organize school assignments and projects and teacher planners designed to organize weekly lesson plans and assignments.

In addition, you will usually find that teacher planners have space for student information, class attendance, seating charts, and even grades.

Student planners are focused more on helping students track assignments and manage projects. Student planners might also include checklists, weekly t0-do lists, and academic goal setting pages.

Is a custom planner worth it?

PurpleTrail custom planners allow you to create a planner designed with your preferred format, but since each one is unique they are slightly more expensive than stock planners.  The cost for a custom planner averages from $35.00 – $85.00 depending on the features you include and the size you select.

Personally, I am very picky about page layouts and what is and is not included in my planner (i.e. I don’t like wasted pages). I love choosing a custom planner that allows me to pick the page layouts I like, the cover I like, and I can add the extra planning pages I need and skip the pages I don’t need.

Because custom planners are more expensive, you want to choose carefully and be sure a custom planner is what you need. 

If you would like more planner choices, please read my best planners for moms review or my review of PurpleTrail Daily, Weekly & Monthly planners.

The Negatives

• Custom planners can be more expensive than pre-printed planners. If you are going to invest in a custom planner, be sure you are committed to using a paper and pen planner and you can design the planner into the format you want.
• Even though you can choose your own layout, it still might not include every you want.  Depending on your personal tastes and planning goals, sometimes it’s hard to find everything you would like included in a planner, even a custom planner. For example, I would love to have inspirational quotes on each page, but that’s not usually available.
• They can be bulky and heavy to carry. PurpleTrail planners use high-quality paper that is thicker and heavier than standard planner paper. The thicker paper makes the planners a little big if you are trying to fit them into your purse and they can make your tote bags and backpacks heavy.  this is not a problem for me because I usually keep my planner on the desktop or countertop and add appointments as needed when I get home or back to my desk.

The Positives

• You can choose your own page layouts. You can choose vertical and horizontal layouts. With the academic year planners, you may also choose a 5-day week or 7-day week.  You can also have your courses/classes pre-printed on each page making it easy to organize and plan assignments.

• You can choose your favorite size. Planners for students and teachers come in 2 sizes either 6” X 8” or 8.5” X 11”.  If you like to have plenty of space for ideas and planning, the 8.5” X 11” offers plenty of planning space.
• Choose your own cover.  You can choose a cover that inspires you or you can create a custom cover by adding your favorite photos. Covers also come in hardcover, laminate or synthetic.  Personally, I like the laminate cover. It’s flexible, but will not tear.

• Choose or start date and length of the planner. With a custom planner, you can choose what month the planner starts and the length – 12 months, 15 months or 18 months. 
•  Add-on pages that work for you. Every planner includes add-on pages. You can choose the best add-on pages that work for you like:
  • Notes pages
  • To-do list pages
  • Password log
  • Graph pages/dotted pages
  • Fitness pages
  • Important dates to plan your school projects and assignments
  • Classroom information for teachers
  • Lesson plan pages
  • Seating charts
  • Many more options…

The PurpleTrail Teacher & Student planners give you many options and features you might not find in other planners and the ability to include just your favorite features all in one planner.

In addition to Teacher & Student planners, Purple Trail also offers planners Mom Planners, Daily, Weekly & Monthly planners, Content Planners/Blog Planners, Meal Planners and more. Check out all the planners Purple Trail offers.

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