Take control of your long range plans with Cc 4.0’s new and improved unit planner

Take control of your long range plans with Common Curriculum 4.0’s new and improved unit planner

At Common Curriculum we believe that there’s no meaningful difference between long-range and daily lesson planning. Good unit planning informs good lesson planning, and vice versa

That’s why we’ve made a ton of improvements to Common Curriculum’s unit planner with Cc 4.0, and to be honest, we’ve never been as excited about our unit planner as we are right now!

Line up units across multiple classes on a single timeline.

To start, you can now view multiple classes right on top of each other in unit planner! As a middle school history teacher, I often found that it was helpful for logistics and management to make sure all of my classes were at roughly the same point in their units at the same time. So, my unit planner might look something like this:

Beautify your units with custom colors!

Those of you that are super into color-coding (i.e. every teacher ever) are going to love the new unit pop-over. Just click on a unit to see it pop up and change the colors of your units on the fly:

Not only is color coding the best thing in the world, but the new unit pop-up menu also makes it super easy to quickly change the titles of your units!

When combined with the new multi-unit timeline, custom colors become super useful for anyone that teaches thematic units, like elementary teachers. For example, imagine that you teach 1st grade and you want to talk about zoos in all of your subject areas in October, you might create units that deal with zoos in different ways in all your classes and then color code them and line them up on the timeline:

A much deeper connection between lesson planning and unit planning

Unit titles now appear above lesson titles on the day, week, month, and unit layouts! Just click on a unit title to compare that unit side by side with its lesson. Oh, and as a bonus, we’ve also added unit standards to the standards tracker.

Here’s an awesome way to use these two new features in tandem:

• Add standards to a unit.
• Click on that unit from the week layout and then copy and paste a few of its standards to one of its child lessons
• Check the standards tracker. You’ll see that you’ve covered the standards in both the unit and the lesson, like so:

You can compare units with lesson from the day, moth, and unit planner layouts too!

Rearranging units now works exactly how you’ve always wanted it to

As part of our unit plan changes, we’ve also completely revamped the way units move on the timeline. The old rules for unit movement were pretty confusing, especially when you were moving units backwards and swapping them with other units on the timeline

Now, when you drag a unit Cc simply makes room for it and drops it in place. There are a few rules for how this works:

• Dragging a unit into the middle of another unit turns it into a sub-unit and makes the parent unit longer
• Dragging a unit onto the beginning of another unit will push the other unit forward
• If you drag a unit onto a blank space, then it will push future units forward, but only if it has to.
• Oh and now when you push the right edge of a unit forward it simply pushes the unit ahead of it forward, which makes extending units way easier.

Check out the new unit dragging behavior in action here:

See an outline of your whole year with one click

We’ve also combined all of the individual unit outlines into one mega outline for each class. In the old version of Cc if you wanted to see the lesson titles from two units you had to endlessly switch back and forth between them.

Fortunately, you can put that endless clicking behind you with Cc 4.0! Just click “outline” once and presto…an entire year of lessons in a single beautiful outline:

Other Unit Changes

• Because we now have an undo button, there’s no need for a save button on the unit planner. That means you can unit plan way faster while also trusting that you can undo any changes you don’t like with one click!
• Units show up above lesson titles in the day, week, month detail pane, and unit planner detail pane!
• The icon for whether a day has a lesson is a lot simpler. It’s just a blue dot. If there’s a dot, that day has a lesson. No blue dot: no lesson.
• Clicking on a blue lesson dot in the timeline pulls it up on the right side of the timeline, instead of at the bottom.