Common Planner vs Make My Lesson

Common Planner is a web-based collaborative lesson planner for teachers, schools, and districts. Teachers can create lesson and unit plans, organize classes, and reuse planbooks and lessons across school years. They can search for standards, attach them to units, and track which standards have been taught. Shared planbooks support co-planning, sharing plans with administrators, and borrowing plans from other teachers. School leaders can review planning status, standards coverage, and pacing, then comment on lesson plans. The school product page describes AI-assisted insights for identifying missing standards, pacing issues, or instructional gaps. Basic for Teachers includes an AI-powered lesson assistant, daily, weekly, and monthly planning, up to 50 Google Classroom posts, and file uploads from a computer or supported storage services. Pro includes unlimited Classroom posts, unit planning, automatic standards tracking, and up to five collaborators. The Basic plan is free forever; Pro is listed at $5.59 a month, with a one-payment amount of 71.88 USD. The Schools plan includes school-wide templates, membership management, staff training, and ongoing support. There is no app, but the service works through a browser on tablets and smartphones.

Make My Lesson creates curriculum-aligned teaching packs, including lesson plans, presentations, classroom activities, and assessments. Plans can contain standards-aligned objectives, timings, differentiation, and Bloom’s balance. Its presentation stage uses lesson objectives to produce a slide deck calibrated to the lesson’s duration, with speaker notes. Activity materials include a student sheet and teacher answer key; assessment materials include a paper and mark scheme. The service lists 69 curriculum routes across Australia, the UK, Canada, International Baccalaureate, and US/AP, along with 16 teaching methods. Teachers can export PDFs and PowerPoints, download ZIP files, print, or share to Google Classroom and Microsoft Teams. Android, iOS, and web platforms are listed. The Free plan includes five generations and requires no card; the listed Monthly plan is $9.99 a month. The pricing note also says paid plans start at $15.99/mo. Unused paid credits expire at the end of the plan period. Lesson inputs are sent to US-based AI providers, which are instructed not to train on them; teachers are advised not to enter identifying student information.