The 5 most important things you should know about Common Curriculum 4.0

We are so incredibly jazzed to be releasing Common Curriculum 4.0 today! Over the last year, we’ve read thousands of feature requests, written 55,000 lines of code, spent countless hours designing the new Cc, and we could not be more excited. No app has ever made lesson planning planning as fast, customizable, and collaborative as Cc 4.0 does.

So, here are the 5 biggest changes that you requested and that we’ve delivered with Common Curriculum 4.0:

1. Our universal undo button’s got your back so you can plan without fear

Let’s start with the coolest and by far most requested change to the app: you can now undo virtually any action you take in Common Curriculum. Previously, you were only able to undo changes to an individual lesson’s history. But what if you leave your laptop open on the coffee table for a moment, and your cat jumps on it and deletes half of Wednesday’s lesson, swaps three lessons on your month calendar, and deletes two of your units?

You might not even know what Mr. Kitty McFuzzybottom changed let alone know how to undo it!

And so we present the undo button, the solution to your kitty-induced-lesson-deletion woes. Seriously though, we know that mischievous kittens aren’t actually a problem. The real issue is that everyone is human and we all make mistakes. If you can do an action in Cc, you should be able to undo it. There’s no better way to earn your trust than by making Cc as forgiving as possible. It’s just that simple.

So, without further ado, clicking undo will show you the last action you took in Cc. Simply, click that action to undo it:

Since Cc remembers the actions you’ve taken each session, you can undo multiple actions in a row, too!

2. Unit plan for every class, at the same time.

Now, on to what is by far the largest change coming in Cc 4.0: a completely revamped unit planner. We’ve written a standalone unit planning blog post if you want to get the skinny on everything we’ve added to the unit layout. For now, here’s just a small taste of what the new unit planner can do:

You can now view multiple classes right on top of each other in the unit planner! Great for elementary teachers and anyone else that wants to line up cross-curricular units:

Oh, and you can now change the color and title of a unit just by clicking on it:

Color-coding my units is potentially the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done while planning.

Check out our post on the new unit planner if you want to learn more. We’ve added a whole-class outline, made the unit dragging behavior way more intuitive, and added a whole bunch of other tiny improvements. You should really check it out.

Endlessly customize your day, week, and month layouts

We believe that every teacher is different, and that you should be able to organize your plans in whatever way makes the most sense to you. That’s why we’ve launched our brand new customize layout button, which lets you personalize the day, week, and month layouts to your individualized lesson planning needs. Here’s how it works on the week layout:

Just click “customize layout” and you’ll see three options. You can combine them in some really awesome and unique ways, like lining up your classes and collapsing your lessons to see a high level overview of your week:

We are really excited to see all of the ways that our teachers use the customize layout options. In fact, I was so excited that I wrote a whole post on just this one little button (hint hint, click click).

Control a whole day of lessons with our brand new day menu

Planning isn’t just about writing individual lessons. It’s also about organizing days, weeks, and months of lessons at a time. That’s why we’ve built shiny new day, week, and month menus to house buttons that affect all your lessons in a given time period:

The day menu is by far the most powerful new menu and adds a ton of powerful new actions that affect all your lessons on a particular day, like:

• shifting an entire day’s worth of lessons forward
• pulling an entire day’s worth of lessons backwards
• quickly turning on or off any lesson for that day
• printing or downloading the lessons for that day

In the day layout, the day menu is simply at the top of the page below the date. In the week and month layout, you’ll find the day menu next to each date. Just click it to make it drop down.

Massive speed improvements + near-instant collaboration

When you’re in lesson planning mode, it’s go time You’ve got the creative juices flowing. You’re ready to write some innovative, engaging, awesome lesson plans, and you’re ready to do it fast.

That’s why we’ve completely rewritten Cc 4.0 from the ground up to make it as fast as possible for you. Everything loads faster in Cc 4.0. These speed improvements don’t just affect your own personal lesson planning, they also make co-planning with your teammates much faster. In fact, Cc now updates your collaborators’ twice as fast as Google Docs does when typing the same content:

Collaborative co-planning has never been this fast!

Spread the word about Common Curriculum 4.0!

We’re super pumped about Cc 4.0, and if you’re just as excited as we are, then why not tell your friends how you about it on Twitter or Facebook? Or reach out to us and let us know what you think!