Five ways Cc 4.0’s new day menu will speed up your lesson planning

Busy work is the enemy of creative and happy teachers. That’s why we’re launching the day menu in Cc 4.0. With the new day menu, when there’s a snow day or a wrinkle in your schedules, you can adjust an entire day of lesson plans with just a few clicks, skipping the busy work and getting back to what’s important: writing awesome lessons for your students.

And so, I present to you Cc 4.0’s new day menu and five ways it destroys lesson planning busy work. Behold:

1. Conquer your snow days with two clicks

Imagine it’s a snow day and there’s two feet of snow outside. So instead of teaching 80 children today, I guess you just have to find the wherewithal to make a hot toddy for yourself and spend the day watching Orange is The New Black.

But before you can get your Netflix on, you need to make sure your plans are bumped forward to tomorrow. In the old version of Cc, that meant dragging or shifting all of your lessons forward one at a time, but no longer! Now it’s just one click. Plus, once you’ve shifted your lessons, you can even turn off all your lessons for that day with just one more click, like so:

Boosh. Netflix time.

Bumping all lessons forward for a day was by far our most requested day-menu-related feature so we’re really pumped to bring it to Cc!

2. Pull future lessons backward when you need to condense your plans

Of course, you’re not limited to pushing lessons forward: you can also pull future lessons backwards! This is useful when you decide to take out a day of instruction because you realize you don’t actually need it:

Don’t worry you can always use the undo button if you change your mind!

3. Copy and paste a whole day when you realize you need to reteach everything you did today

Sometimes, when you bump a whole day of lessons forward, it’s not because of a snow day… it’s because you need to reteach your lessons, or because they’re actually all multi-day lessons (for example, you might be doing a frog dissection lab in four classes that lasts two days). Wouldn’t it be great to be able to copy/paste a whole day of lessons in that situation?

Copying and pasting a whole day is super useful when you need to reteach a bunch of lessons!

4. Quickly toggle classes on or off for A/B day schedules

Maybe you teach an A/B schedule and you just want to turn two of your classes off, since you don’t teach them today.

Previously you had to go into the lesson menu for each of those classes and then click “Mark as Not Teaching”. Now, it’s twice as fast, you just click the day menu, and at the bottom you can turn any of your classes on or off:

The quick-toggle menu is also great for surprise assemblies and half days!

5. Quickly print a whole day of lessons from inside the day menu

Finally, we’ve moved the print-day and download-day buttons into the day menu. That way the print buttons are always in an obvious place. If you want to print a lesson, you click the lesson menu. If you want to print a whole day you click the day menu, if you want to print a week, you go to the week and click the week menu, and so on.

Printing a whole day, week, or month is only available to Cc Pro customers. Any Cc teacher can print an individual lesson from the lesson menu even if they haven’t subscribed to Cc Pro

The day menu is by far the most powerful new change that we made to the day layout, but eagle-eyed teachers will also notice that the undo button and customize layout button show up when you’re looking at a day of lessons. They also show up when you’re looking at a week or month of lessons (as well as in the unit layout for the undo button), which is why we’ve given them their own posts. Those are two of the most powerful buttons in Cc 4.0 so you should totally check them out.