Makayla Whitted

Scott Straub

Education Technology 1

3 July 2019

Common Curriculum

The program that I have chosen to research is Common Curriculum. I chose to research

this program because it is a great tool to take a lot of information and put it into an organized

form that is easy to view and understand. This is something that I struggle with, so I believe that

this will be a very helpful tool for me during my teaching career. The program was launched in

the year 2012. Researching this program has taught me a lot about everything a teacher has to

think about and what my teaching career is going to look like on a day to day basis, as far as

planning. Just watching a video tutorial on Common Curriculum showed me how organized

teachers must be and showed me just how much preparation goes into just a single day. Seeing it

all laid out on Common Curriculum really helped me see this. This program helps teachers create

lesson plans according to state standards and organize their lessons in a format that is very easy

to view, edit, and share. After creating a lesson, teachers can organize them into units, and move

the lessons around to different days on the calendar. These lessons can also be shared among

other teachers. Another handy feature of Common Curriculum is that a team of teachers can all

work on a lesson together and view what changes each of their team members have made to the

lesson in real time. This feature is much like using a shared document on Google Docs. An

example of how I might use this program in my future teaching career is making lesson plans.

The program allows you to view lessons for an entire day, week or month. So for example, I

could create an entire month’s worth of lessons, and review them at a glance as the weeks and
days approach. Another example of how I could use Common Curriculum in my career, is that I

could share lessons with my fellow teachers and collaborate creating lessons with them to make

sure that they align with each other and with state standards. I had a difficult time coming up

with challenges that one might encounter while using the program. To me, the program seems to

have a lot of benefits and not many setbacks. The only issue that I could see arising would be

conflicts between teachers on a shared lesson plan. For example, if I worked on a lesson and felt

that I had perfected it, and another teacher completely changed it, I might become upset. There

are three different payment options for Common Curriculum. The “Basic Plan” is free, and

teachers can do things like daily, weekly, and monthly planning, search and add standards to

lessons; and print or download individual lessons. In the “Pro Plan,” teachers can do everything

in basic, plus things like unit planning; automatic standards tracking; and edit, comment on, and

re-use plans with collaborators. This plan costs $4.89 per month. Lastly, in the “Schools Plan,”

teachers can do everything in pro, plus do things like organize school planbooks in one place;

organize teachers into teams; and share templates with their entire school.

Tutorials:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0C1UBT8PsA&t=8s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-8Ev3gJSDg&t=11s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWwamD96K7k&t=48s