At Common Curriculum we’ve always believed that there’s no real difference between lesson planning and unit planning. Good unit planning informs good lesson planning, and vice versa. A great lesson planner without a powerful unit planner just doesn’t do everything you need it to.
We’ve improved Cc’s unit planner in every major release of the app, but we’ve probably never been as excited as we are about the changes we made to it in Cc 4.0!
Line up units across multiple classes on a single timeline.
You can now view multiple classes right on top of each other in unit planner! The new multi-unit timeline is especially useful for for 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.
Now you can make a unit called"Zoos" in all of your classes, and make sure that those units line up on exactly the right dates all on one screen.
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. That way all of my classes felt like they had fallen into a tight routine that kept the classroom moving forward. My unit planner might look something like this:
So organized! So pretty!
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:
Oh and by the way, this mighty little pop-up makes changing your unit titles way way faster too!
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:
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:
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!
Line up units across multiple classes on a single timeline.
Beautify your units with custom colors!
See an outline of your whole year with one click
Rearranging units now works exactly how you've always wanted it to
Other Unit Changes