Community reviews for Common Curriculum

I love Common Curriculum! Not only can I keep students updated and on track on a daily basis, but I can also share my lesson plans and my curriculum with colleagues. Creating my PlanBook took a little time at first, but once I figured out the norms of the site, I had no problem advancing to sharing my lesson within a group of other math teachers in my school on Common Curriculum's website.

Low ratings on this product for student engagement are due to the fact that this is not a student-used product. I love Common Curriculum and can see a great deal of potential for keeping up with lesson planning and collaborating with professional learning communities. To me, the best part of this product is the fact that it is accessible from any computer, so lesson planning becomes a great deal easier. We've all experienced moments of brilliant insight at home into how a lesson should go the next day only to forget completely what those insights were when we arrive at school. Common Curriculum helps to eliminate this frustration!

I teach a few classes more than once a day, and couldn't put it in my plan book that way. I contacted the help desk and they got back to me rather quickly, but said it's not a feature they have or plan on having. Oh well.

It is a very well thought out program. Highly Recommend using it!

I think the success and impressiveness of this tool depends on the user and their level of lesson planning right now. I would certainly recommond this tool for beginners. It is ideal for new teachers who have not had to create many lessons before or those who have trouble long-term planning. CommonCurriculum lets you set up a lesson template (assuming you follow the same general plan each time in a given class) and then apply that template to any all classes you teach. You can set your schedule for variations if you daily schedule changes regularly. You can also delete or move components of your plans around if the day doesn't proceed as expected or another activity runs overtime. One of the nicest aspects is the ability to see all of the state standards for your state and select them to fit neatly into your plan. There is also a component where you can build your lesson plans into a larger unit and organize those units into a year long plan. All of these things are great if you haven't done them before or if you've still been using a paper lesson plan book. However, many districts now have collaborative spaces for team planning or curriculum management software to hold diary maps and align lessons to standards. Personally, I appreciate the template for helping organize my thoughts, but the template could have easily been a PDF document and done the same thing. Since I don't have classes that repeat regularly, the appeal of using my template day after day was lost on me. I would consider recommending CommonCurriculum to new teachers or students teachers I work with who haven't planned much on their own yet, but I think my established teacher peers would find it redundant to work they have already done. We use a curriculum managemant system called AtlasRubicon that allows our staff to create lesson plans with a template, align the lessons to standards, and share them with each other. Many of my staff were doing such things in their own way before we contracted with Altas Rubicon. I don't think this would really help them. It would just duplicate work that they have already done.

This planning tool makes it easy to set up classes, align individual lessons to specific standards, and modify lessons by dragging and dropping items. When lessons took longer than usual I didn't have to go back and rewrite things, all I needed to do was drag the things I didn't get to over to the next day's plans and drop them there with a single mouse click. In addition, CommonCurriculum allowed me to select certain items in my plans to post to a parent website. With a single click the plans I want posted are available for parents to see without me having to set up anything. This tool has allowed me not only to easily create plans, but also to easily share them.

It is a wonderful tool that teachers can use for any type of students. It offers a variety of entry points that are useful for teachers that have an heterogeneous class.

Originally I thought that Common Curriculum would be a tool that I could use to keep my lesson plans in the cloud, however once I started investigating it further, I realized all of the possibilities- you can even search state and common core standards within your lessons! This site offers many options for free that other products charge for and I am a big fan of free! It is super fast and easy to set up your account and if you get stuck on any step there are “how-to” videos available to help you out. I also appreciate the FAQ section where experts and fellow users offer support to various questions that are posted. I also think that the ability to share and collaborate with other educators in your building is key, and it offers prebuilt lesson plan and unit templates at your fingertips. Your lessons are stored in one place, you can easily organize your lessons by date, and all of your items are stored in a cloud for easy access. I highly recommend this product to others- I think it will truly change your ability to share and collaborate.

The collaborative Common Curriculum planner allows teachers to organize and plan their teaching units with a look towards how things fit both into the unit as well as within the school year. This gives a whole new meaning to pacing as you have the chance to actually see what you were unable to finish during a class and move those activities to another class period further into the school year. The drawback is that collaboration is limited to view only. While it’s ok for my purposes, co-teachers might prefer the ability to edit each other’s planners as well. Also the limitation for one collaborator per class means that if the teacher wants me as their coach to view and comment on their planner, then they can’t add their principal as well without incurring the $99 fee.

Common Curriculum is an amazing planning site that offers so much for free! Teachers have access to upload unlimited files, units and lesson plans for an unlimited number of classes. The free account also comes with the ability to collaborate with another teacher. Schools that would like to have collaborative access for all teachers pay $99 per teacher. The features I love include the ability to create your own template, drag and drop lesson plans and units, bump lessons to another day, align to standards, share homework and assignments on your class website, print, and share with a colleague! It is also very easy to share lesson plans with your administrator. I am excited to use it this year!