Why I Switched to an Electronic Teacher Diary (And Built My Own in Google Sheets)

I moved from paper to an electronic teacher diary after years of trying different options, and I now run mine entirely through a custom Google Sheets system. It's not perfect, but it lets me store everything for a lesson in one place, adjust plans in seconds instead of using white-out, and copy a previous term's structure rather than starting from scratch. Whether paper or digital is right for you comes down to what actually works for how you teach.

Love them or hate them, here are some of the reasons I've come to love an electronic teacher diary. This is a genuinely divisive topic among teachers, and I've sat on both sides of it across sixteen years in the classroom.

What's actually wrong with paper teacher diaries?

I used paper-based diaries for years. I'm enough of a hoarder that I only recently got rid of some of my earliest ones from the start of my career.

The downsides are real. They're expensive. They're heavy, and they take up a lot of space. They get messy fast, especially once you're a few months into a busy term.

I'll also admit I have a perfectionist streak that made paper diaries genuinely difficult for me. More than once, I made a mistake, or spilled coffee on a page, and found myself unable to keep using that diary. I ended up buying a whole new one just to get past it. That's not a cheap habit to have.

Looking back, that's probably the moment I should have realised paper was never going to be a sustainable long-term system for me. It took a few more years and a few more ruined diaries before I actually acted on it.

What was your first electronic teacher diary like?

Rough, if I'm honest.

The very first one I tried was from an Australian brand that also sold physical diaries. It wasn't cloud-based at all. You had to install actual software onto your device to use it, which meant you needed the right device just to get started. Not the easiest entry point into digital diaries.

I later found another Australian teacher diary company, this one genuinely cloud-based. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't updated often, and it wasn't exactly good-looking. But it worked, and it did what I needed it to do. I used it happily for years, until the company closed that particular service down.

Losing access to a system you've built years of habits around is more disruptive than it sounds. It wasn't just about finding a replacement product, it was about rebuilding a whole workflow I'd relied on without thinking twice about it.

Why did you end up building your own in Google Sheets?

Losing that cloud-based diary meant I had to come up with my own solution. I looked seriously at OneNote as a teacher diary option, and it's still something I think about, but I've never quite worked out how I want to structure it.

What I actually settled on was Google Sheets. I built a template for each of my classes, per term. In Australia, our school year runs across four terms, from late January to around mid-December, which is a different structure to a lot of other countries.

I've been using this system since 2022 or 2023, so three or four years now, and it genuinely suits how I work.

What does your Google Sheets teacher diary actually include?

Each class gets its own sheet. As a high school teacher, I currently teach four and a half classes (the "half" being a class I share with another teacher), so that's four and a half sheets, one per class.

Within each sheet, I track:

• Date, period, and week

• The big idea or focus of the lesson

• A direct link to the relevant Google Slides

• Whether the lesson has actually been completed

Everything I need for a lesson lives in one place, rather than being scattered across multiple folders in Google Drive. I can turn links into smart chips right inside the sheet, so they're ready to click the moment I need them.

That single change, having everything centralised, is probably the biggest practical difference between this system and any paper diary I've ever used. There's no flipping between a physical diary and a laptop to find the actual resource. It's all sitting in the same tab.

The part I love most is how easy it makes adjusting plans. If a lesson gets missed, whether I'm away, there's an event, or something else comes up, I can simply cut that row and move everything else down one. Compare that to a paper diary, where the same fix means white-out, rewriting, and a genuinely messy page. Digital wins that comparison every time for me.

Why not just use a ready-made digital diary?

There are plenty of digital teacher diaries already on the market, and I've tried a few. The problem is most of them are heavily built around the American school system.

Australia does things differently. Our term structure, our school year, and the way our system is organised don't map neatly onto tools designed overseas. I'm not knocking our system, I genuinely like teaching here, but it does make off-the-shelf digital diaries a harder fit.

That's part of why I built my own version instead of adopting something premade, and honestly, I'd still love to build something more polished that other teachers could use too. It's a project I keep coming back to.

There's also something useful about building your own system, even an imperfect one. I know exactly why every part of my sheet is structured the way it is, because I built it around my own workflow rather than someone else's assumptions about how a school year runs.

Want to go deeper into how a system like this actually gets built? I've run a full Innovative EdTech Workshop specifically on teacher diaries, covering exactly this kind of setup.

Is an electronic teacher diary right for you?

Only you can answer that. At this point, electronic is clearly what works for me, and I don't see myself going back to paper. But that's a decision based on how I work, not a rule for everyone.

If you like the tactile, physical feel of writing things down, or if a paper diary genuinely serves your planning style better, there's nothing wrong with sticking with it. The point isn't digital versus paper as a competition. It's finding the system that actually reduces your admin load, rather than adding to it.

Whichever way you land, I'd genuinely love to see what you come up with. This isn't a topic with one right answer, and the best system is always going to be the one you'll actually keep using.

If you want to see exactly how a system like this comes together, check out the Innovative EdTech Workshop on teacher diaries. We go through the setup properly, live.

Tristan