From a wedding board to lesson plans
Alison teaches at a Montessori school. The first big thing Alison organized visually was a wedding, in Milanote: a board called Wedding, and inside it a board for the bridesmaids, one for the florals, one for the tablescapes, each filled with Pinterest finds and to-do lists.
Alison liked how simple that was. This time the subject is lesson plans, and the difference is collaboration: a coworker should be working in the same plans. That need led to xTiles, and it's what this comparison is about.
How each tool is organized
Milanote is built around boards you click into. A board can hold notes, images, links and to-dos, and it can hold other boards, so you go deeper one click at a time. It's very good at a single creative mood board.
xTiles uses three fixed levels, and Alison's own analogy from the call is the clearest way to explain them:
- Space — the filing cabinet. A personal space for you, a shared space for you and your colleagues.
- Project — a folder in the cabinet, such as one teaching unit.
- Pages — the sheets in the folder, shown as tabs along the top, so you never have to dig several levels down.
Each page is a free-form canvas of tiles, which work much like the cards on a Milanote board: notes, images, links, embedded videos and to-do lists, placed and resized wherever you want them.
Mapping a lesson unit into xTiles
Alison's structure: a unit such as Fall, a topic inside it such as Apples, and activities sorted by type — math, hands-on, outdoor. Here is one way that maps:
One project per unit
Create a project called Fall in your shared space. The unit is the folder.
A front page that works as a table of contents
The first page lists the topics in the unit, Apples, Leaves, Pumpkins, with a link to each topic's page, so anyone can jump straight in.
One page per topic, one tile per activity type
On the Apples page, give math activities, hands-on activities and outdoor activities a tile each. Color them differently so the types are easy to scan.
Drop in the inspiration
Add images and links from Pinterest or any site into the matching tile, next to the activity notes and materials list.
Search the template gallery for lesson or academic planners, use one as a starting layout, then rename pages and recolor tiles to fit your own system.
Where xTiles pulls ahead: planning with a colleague
This is the part that matters most for a teaching team. In xTiles, you create a shared space and invite your colleague. Every project you create inside it is shared with them automatically, so a new unit doesn't need a fresh round of invitations. The shared space sits in both of your sidebars, so nobody hunts for a link in an email.
If a project should stay private, you can restrict access to it. And sharing is part of the free plan.
Turn a to-do into a task, assign it to your colleague with a date — print the apple counting cards by Thursday — and it appears in their planner alongside everything else they have that week.
Which to choose
- Choose Milanote for a single visual mood board you keep to yourself, like a wedding or a design concept.
- Choose xTiles when the plans are shared: several units, a colleague or two working in them, and tasks that need an owner and a date.
One more option: if you use Claude or ChatGPT, you can connect it to xTiles and ask it to create a starting project for a unit, then adjust it by hand. We showed this on the call; the unit structure above works just as well built by hand.