Share vs Clone/Copy - The Basics

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 main goals that a teacher may have as they collaborate on 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! 

Each of these use cases can also apply to curriculum that you are designing for your own courses.

Clone/Copy

Most of the time when you are creating new units, cloning is the right choice.  Cloning creates a new copy of a unit for each class, allowing you to edit them separately (i.e. adding the dates can differ slightly if you get off pace).  If there is a chance that your courses will get "off pace" and dates matter to you, you will want to create a unit once and clone it into each of your courses.

Important Characteristics:

• Changes to the unit are independent of other copies.
• Another instance of the unit is created.
• Behaves similarly to Save As.

There are two main use cases for Cloning/Copying a unit:

• Clone: Create another instance/copy of this unit for yourself to use in any course.
• Copy: Send another instance/copy of this unit to another teacher for them to use independently of your copy.

Clone a unit:

Send a copy of a unit:

Share

In certain circumstances, you may wish to share a unit with more than one course such that they are actually identical and will not get off pace.  If you share a unit with more than one course instead of cloning it, any changes made to the unit will affect all of the shared courses and you cannot edit the courses independently.  If you have any of the same students in both courses, it is not recommended that you Share a unit between those two courses, as only one score for the student can exist for an assessment/standard in a unit.  In this case you typically would want to use a Clone of the unit in the other course.

This is also the case if you share a unit with another teacher.  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 and delete scores for the unit, provided that the unit is properly associated with one or more of their courses.

 Important Characteristics:

• All changes affect every user with whom the unit has been shared.  
• One instance of the unit that all shared users collaborate on.
• Behaves similarly to a Google doc.

There are two different use cases for Sharing a unit:

• Share with your own courses (make available in your courses, all changes affect any course this unit is shared with).

• Share with one or more teachers (make available in your courses, all changes affect any course this unit is shared with).

Share with your own courses:

Share with one or more teachers: