What's the difference between sharing and cloning a unit?

Teaching, at its heart, is a collaborative endeavor.  No matter how isolated or integrated your classroom may be with others at your school, there is always more than one person invested in educating each student.  At JumpRope, we believe that the curriculum and grading system should reflect that principle.  JumpRope allows teachers to share units with one another in order to support cross-curricular teaching, co-teaching, and the sharing of curriculum in general.  However, as any user of Google Docs can point out, not all sharing is created equal.  In our tool, we have identified two different goals that a teacher may have as they share a unit:

1. Share: The teacher who created the unit is actively working with the teacher(s) who are shared.  In this use case, each teacher involved may add, remove, and edit standards and assessments within the unit.  The shared users may also edit the unit properties (such as title, description, and dates) as well as add or remove additional teachers and courses.  Shared teachers can also enter scores for the unit, provided that the unit is properly associated with one or more of their courses.
2. Clone/Copy: The teacher who created the unit wants to share the curriculum so that another teacher can take the unit and "make it their own" for a different class.  In this use case, the teacher doesn't want their own standards and assessments "messed around with."  In fact, it could be potentially disastrous because the other teacher may inadvertently delete data and even scores! 

Sending A Copy of A Unit to Another Teacher

Cloning a Unit

Rather than "sharing" a unit in the method described above, you may wish to create a copy of the unit that allows you to edit it without affecting the original (for example, if you are teaching the same unit in a new term and wish to change assessment dates or modify certain standards).  To support this, JumpRope has a Clone function that makes a new copy of the Unit and all related standards and assessments, just for you.  To clone a unit, simply edit the unit and look for the blue Clone button in the popup window.  Be sure to give your cloned unit a name that helps you distinguish it from the original (if necessary).

We believe that these options allow teachers to share units with one another in either of the two use cases.  If you have ideas or comments, please let us know in the forums!

The Resource Share

It is also possible that you are viewing a unit that has been shared via the Resource Share (which has different names for some of our network- and school-based users).  In this case, the unit can be viewed but you must clone it into your account before editing the unit, standards, or assessments... and before entering scores!  For more information about the Resource Share, check out this article.

NOTE: In our system, a "unit" refers to a logical grouping of related curriculum.  Your school or personal preference may be to refer to this as something else (for example, an investigation or case study), which is a setting within the Admin Console on a school-by-school basis.  However - because I'm not inclined to write several versions of every help document - we'll be using the term unit throughout our help and support system.