1. Classmaker lets you avoid writing a hand written Weekly calendar for your plans, which often change out of recognition by week's end. You can easily modify your plans as you go along.
2. Classmaker keeps all your planning in a single database file as plain text. The Firebird database used is open for you to connect to from other applications eg. Open Office using a Firebird ODBC driver, so you are in no danger of your data becoming unreachable.
3. Effective teachers use detailed plans before they teach, created using a standardised methodology, which can be an onerous process to follow. Classmaker keeps this as simple as possible with the final output being an easy to follow printed plan of the day's lessons that you can take to class as a hard copy for your day's teaching.
4. Classmaker has three levels of planning, arranged hierarchically. Long Term plans display your units of work by subject over a whole term. Unit plans aggregate your lessons and supporting files into a "folder" that can be copied between databases and/or Long Term plans. Lesson plans display the individual detail on the Weekly calendar.
5. Classmaker can have different subjects for different users. If you are a specialist teacher you can share your school's database with other teachers who teach different subjects.
6. Classmaker can synchronise between databases without needing to be connected to the Internet. If you prefer to plan at home, you take your laptop home and plan on it. As you plan you check the Unit plans you are working on. Before finishing your planning that evening, you export all your Unit plans to disk in one go. When you return to school and log into the school server instance of Classmaker from your laptop, you can see the plans you exported to disk previously. Just one click uploads each exported plan onto the school's server. Conversely, you can synchronise your laptop's database with the server database using the same process in reverse.