In addition to writing short stories, I also teach social studies to 7th graders. I’d love to have one software program to do both story planning/writing and lesson planning/writing. I could create my own lesson plan template (rather like your short story or screenplay templates) except I can’t figure out how. I searched the forums using “project template” but you will not believe how many forum posts contain one or both of those words.
Is it possible to create my own project template for lesson plans? If so, would you please direct me to the tutorial, video, or help section on it? I can’t find it, and today I seem to have the dumb pretty badly.
Absolutely! Creating custom templates is an important step in making Scrivener your own tool. There are two ways you can go about it. You can either start with a blank project and build up from there, or you can use one of the existing templates and alter it to suit your goal. Both are accomplished the same way: you would use the New Project tool to select the starting point, and then create a temporary project in which you will design the template. Templates are basically nothing more than “frozen” projects. Any project you create can be used to make a template, even a fully formed lesson (though that probably wouldn’t be useful). So feel free to do what you want. Everything you do in the project will be saved in the template in the same way that it gets saved into the project file as you work in it. Window size, splits, corkboard options, meta-data, the stuff in the binder, compile settings—all of that will be saved.
Once you get it the way you like, just use the File/Save As Template... menu command. Give it a name, description, and icon and you’re done. It will show up in the category you selected for future use. To refine the template in the future (I find my own templates take about four to six iterations of usage before they settle down) just follow the same procedure as above, using your current custom template as a starting point.
The temporary projects you create to make these can be safely deleted once the template is saved.
Full documentation for this can be found in §7.6 of the user manual PDF, but the bit about creating your own starts in §7.6.2 (pg. 55).
Incidentally, I know of a lot of people that use Scrivener for planning their courses, producing the syllabus, and setting up full lessons to the day. You should find it works quite well for the task.