Using Absence Plans

About Absence Plans

Absence plans are the core of SubPlans -- they are the plans that you create to facilitate student learning, when you're out of your classroom. Absence plans are combined with classroom and school info to generate complete sub plans each time you're out of the classroom.

You'll interact with absence plans primarily from the homepage of SubPlans, which is your 'Absence Plans' Dashboard; from here you can track all your current, future, and past absence plans.

Dashboard Organization

There are 4 types of absence plans; your 'Absence Plans' dashboard is organized into tabs so you can easily browse plans of the same type:

    • Active - plan assigned to a particular absence date
    • Emergency - complete plan available to be assigned to any absence date in the future
    • Draft - work in progress
    • Archived - completed plan from a past absence date

Activating Plans

Activating a plan assigns the plan to an absence date; you can activate any emergency or draft plan. To activate an archived plan, duplicate the plan first.

When you activate a plan you'll enter the following:

    1. Absence Date: when this plan will be used
    2. If students know/do not know you'll be absent
    3. Message to the Sub: custom note for this absence date

Once active, the complete sub plan will include the information entered above as well as a unique 6-letter access code that subs can use to view the plan and additional info. Feel free to share this code with subs in advance.

Deactivating Plans

If you no longer plan to be absent, you can deactivate a plan from the 'Active Plans' tab on your dashboard.

Deactivating a plan will:

    1. Remove all data entered during activation
    2. Invalidate the sub access code
    3. Return its previous tab: draft or emergency

Deactivated plans can be re-activated at any time

Duplicating Plans

Once you have a few plans set-up, it's unlikely that you'll keep creating plans from scratch. It's much easier to make a copy of an existing plan and edit as needed.

You can duplicate any plan (active, emergency, draft or archive) from the 'Absence Plan Dashboard' or from the plan's edit screen.

When you duplicate a plan:

  1. An exact, duplicate copy is created
  2. The original title will be prepended with "Copy of"
  3. The duplicate plan is placed in the Draft tab

Deleting Plans

You can only delete one type of plan in SubPlans: draft plans. Drafts are your workspace to create and experiment, if you duplicate an extra plan, or create something you don't need -- feel free to delete it.

    • If you need to remove an active plan, deactivate the plan
    • If you need to remove an emergency plan, click "edit" and uncheck the "emergency plan" box under the title
    • Once a plan is no longer active or emergency, it will be a draft and can be deleted

Archive plans cannot be deleted, as they are are running record of the plans for each past absence.

To delete a draft plan:

    1. Select the plan from the 'Draft' tab

Under "More" select "Delete"

    1. Confirm deletion

Sharing Plans

Each absence plan has a view-only share link, which allows the plan to be viewed by others. To access a plan via its share link, recipients must have a SubPlans account and login.

Each plan's share link allows a recipient to view only the information on the absence plan form (not, the corresponding classroom or school info). Teachers who receive a share link will have the option to make a copy of the plan, which will be saved in their 'Draft' tab.

No one who receives a share link will be able to edit the original plan; SubPlans does not facilitate collaborating on a single plan.

Share links do not expire: as long as the shared plan exists, its view-only link will work and when accessed it will return the most current version of the plan.

To share a plan with others:

    1. Click "Share" (you'll find this under the "More" menu on the dashboard, or in the absence plan form)
    2. Copy the share link
    3. Send the link to another SubPlans user

Downloading Plans

If you need to print or save one of your own plans, you will want to download a PDF from SubPlans.

To download a plan:

    1. Access your account through the Login Page.
    2. Click on the Absence Plans button at the top of the page.
    3. Review your plans, and decide which ones you want to download (Active, Emergency, Draft & Archived plans can all be downloaded).
    4. For each plan, click "Print" (you'll find this under the "More" menu on the dashboard) to generate a PDF of your plan.
    5. Download and save the PDF on your computer.