How To Use Common Curriculum

I just literally listed them by the date, which was a silly thing to do because in this particular school year that meant that I can go back and then change these lessons very easily. Eventually I got wise, I started expanding my Google documents. So in this particular lesson plan, this is everything I did for my very first unit of the school year, but just sort of all hosted week by week day by day. Which was great. Unless you teach more than one class because then you're going to have to be toggling back and forth between different Google documents, eventually I was shared this lesson template by a coworker. And this is a true beast monstrosity. The unfortunate thing about this document, this one's 75 pages long of lessons. It is so long and it takes up so much data. It doesn't actually load properly. If I skip through to future pages, especially if I'm using my Chromebook at school, things will not load the document will actually cache and I'll get these sort of blank pages instead of my actual lessons. 

Oh, awful. But because of the use of bookmarks, I can quickly go and see what I'm doing in any given week. And it gives me a nice side by side view what I'm doing, but just the limitations of space here are really significant. I don't have room for my standards. I hardly have room for my assignment dates, my homework assignment, I certainly don't have room for differentiation in other important things that I might want to include on my lesson plan. So in comes common curriculum, the heavy weight, in my opinion, in the current online curriculum instructional design tools. When you sign up for a free account on common curriculum, it will prompt you to create a plan book. I'm going to go ahead and show you my current one. And the nice thing about this is if you bookmark common curriculum, it will always take you to the current week. I recorded this during the first week of October. And so it has taken me here. And if I click on the day here at the top, I toggle that, it will tell me that today is Wednesday, October 6th. Correct. Good job, comic curriculum. 

These were the lessons that I worked on today with my students. And the nice thing about this toggle view for those of us who have done lessons on a big calendar before, this gives me the calendar view very quickly. But without the hassle because common curriculum allows you to easily adjust the order as well as the content in each individual lessons. We'll go through some pro tips, momentarily. But let me highlight some of the cool features. On this platform. So perhaps the first thing that's worth mentioning is the fact that you can easily adjust the template to your actual lessons themselves under settings. If you hit change templates, I can actually edit what will go into my lessons from the start. So let's say, for example, that you start every day with a warm up question, you can easily just automatically have that imported into every single lesson for the entire year, that way you don't have to type it over and over again. So for objectives, for example, on this particular week, I have students will be able to dot, dot, dot, and I just need to fill in the blanks. I've been a little lazy this week. 

Standards are also fantastic on this website. Minor directly linked to the Ohio mass standards. And again, you can have this automatically set to link to your standards. It's a really nice view of the standards. And all I have to do is just click on whatever standards we're doing. Scroll, click off this page, close and return to the lesson, and they are automatically imported there, which is super super nice. Speaking of things that are super nice, most of us teach standards for more than one day. And on any basically column, any section on comic curriculum, you can easily copy by rocking this button down here, the copy card. And then I can easily just paste that into subsequent days. And that works actually for any feature on comic curriculum. If you want to copy your procedures, your objectives, your homework, which, by the way, are all custom categories, sometimes I like to add a card. These are called cards at the bottom. For just extra extra resources. Maybe I found something cool for rates of change. 

But you know, we didn't have time or just based on the current level of my students. It's not something we got to in this particular year. That might be something that I throw on here. Wow, I had a really cool rate of change maybe that I didn't get to. Just like a Google Doc, you can link things very easily on this. You do that with this tool here at the bottom of the page. This thumbnail attach file, or you can attach a link at comments, all sorts of great things. Let's talk about some pro tips. Number one, common curriculum allows you to import your school districts calendar so that everything is already up and ready to go. At the beginning of the school year. Pro tip number two, one of my favorites is this feature called bumping lessons, which actually just allow you to shift every lesson forwards, and then you can also pull lessons backwards. This is really nice when we get those nice snow days or maybe just an unexpected change in your lesson. 

Pro-tip number three, obviously this tool is online. It's there forever. We can reuse these lessons, but perhaps a nice feature about this is you can actually search previous lessons by title if you want to see what you did on that day. Or you can simply copy and paste lessons from previous school years into whatever school year you're on. No need to actually go back and retype everything. You can literally just re report your lessons. And my final tip for you very much like the G Suite where you can add collaborators and edit, common curriculum has the same exact technology, where you can actually assign different preference levels. So you could give someone viewing writes perhaps an administrator or a fellow teacher in your building, just so you know. 

Where you are in the curriculum, or if you want to co plan with someone, you can do that together and simultaneously actually edit lessons together, which is a super time saving feature. All right guys, that's all I had on how to use that awesome tool called common curriculum. I hope you enjoyed it. I know that I do. This video is not sponsored by common curriculum. It's just a really powerful tool that I thought you might enjoy learning about. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to comment below. Otherwise, I'll catch you next time. Thanks.