Everything we’ve added to Cc 4.0 to shave hours off your weekly planning routine
When we taught, we spent most of our planning time writing lessons for the following week, so anything that made weekly planning faster, made our lives easier…. which is why I’m so pumped to tell you about all the new features we’ve added to the week layout in Common Curriculum 4.0!
1. Dragging cards and lessons is way easier for teachers with long lessons or crazy schedules.
One of our teachers’ favorite ways to use Cc is to make adjustments to their weekly plans by dragging cards between lessons… or even by dragging whole lessons themselves. Unfortunately, dragging a card between lessons can require a ton of scrolling if those lessons are on the long side! So, now when you drag a card, all of the other cards in all your lessons collapse, making it easier to find the exact spot where you’d like to drop it:
Plus, when you drag a lesson, the same thing happens, except now all your lessons collapse, making it super easy to put your lesson in the right place, even if your classes aren’t lined up at them moment.
2. Quickly toggle classes on or off for A/B day schedules
While we haven’t fully automated A/B schedules yet (we’re working on it), we have made it much easier for people that teach on rotating schedules to quickly plan a week of lessons in Cc. That’s on account of the fancy new on/off buttons in our fancy new day menu.
Simply click on one of the five dates at the top of the week view, and you’ll see the menu for that day pop up. Then you can toggle any of your classes on or off for that day with one click:
3. Personalize the layout of your weekly plans and make it easier to focus on what you care about
First things first, we’ve added a new button called “customize layout”. It’s on the day and month views too, but it’s probably most consequential when used on the week view. It lets you change three options about how your lessons are currently being displayed on the screen:
- Line up classes in nice straight horizontal lines
- Collapse lessons down to just their lesson titles
- Filter classes to see a single class or group of classes in isolation
Those options are great on their own, but become truly powerful when you combine them, almost like creating recipes for different types of lesson planning workflows…. in fact those recipes are so great that we wrote a whole post on them (hint hint, click click)
4. Adjust your weekly plans for off-days and other scheduling hiccups with the new day menu
Speaking of day menus…. we have day menus! …. with a ton of actions that affect all the lessons on a day! We hear from a lot of teachers that they truly fell in love with Cc once they discovered the lesson menu, because it takes a simple and flexible lesson planner and puts it on steroids. So, we figured “why not make a menu for the entire day as well?”. We put every action we could think of in that menu, and I explain each of those actions in more detail in this post, but I think there are two buttons that are obviously cooler than the rest:
5. Reference your units while lesson planning in the week (and day and month) layouts!
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:
6. New week menu makes it easier to find the print and download buttons
Once we built the day menu, we realized that it was super helpful and clear to have all the actions associated with a unit of time to be put into their own menu… so we built a week menu too! Right now, the week menu serves as a clearer and more obvious location for printing, downloading and sharing links to lessons:
In the future, if we add any more actions that affect an entire week, we’ll put them here.
7. Redesigned card buttons save space so you can write longer lessons more easily
Vertical space is at a premium when you’re planning, so we’ve collapsed the card buttons to make it easier to see longer lessons. It’s definitely a small change, but we did it to make the little things you do every day in Cc that much easier. Also we think the new buttons quite a bit prettier as well:
