Tags, Without the Tidying
Or: the boring feature that keeps the useful ones working.
September 22, 2026 — By Brent Miller
Tidying up can be therapeutic. It is a good job for when you are low on energy, or regrouping in the middle of a complicated project. So, just back from holiday, I decided to tidy the tags in Lesson Commons: my own tags, and then the system for creating, importing and organising them.
The tidying was simple. A few loose tags, a few look-alike tags from different subjects, an afternoon of work by hand. The hard part was building the safeguards so the mess could not come back by accident. That took over a week, and by the end I had steam coming out of my ears. It was an ambitious start to September.
The folder called “Worksheets”
Everyone has a folder called Worksheets. It started well. Now it has four hundred files in it, and you make a new worksheet every September because looking is slower than starting again.
Tags are supposed to prevent that. A tag is a label on a question, an exercise, a lesson or a whole course: present simple, listening for gist, asking for directions, B1. Later you search by that label and pull together “every listening-for-gist exercise I have at B1” from any course you own.
That works until the tags themselves get messy, and I am the proof. In half a year of authoring courses I wrote Present Simple, present-simple, en-present-simple and A2-present-simple: not one tag, but four. Imported courses brought their own spellings. Two subjects shared words like Listening, Reading and Grammar, so one tag meant two things. My tag library was already too messy for my taste, and I knew why nobody fixes this: tidying is not teaching.
What is new in the Editor
You can organise your tags into Subject Collections. A Subject Collection is a named set of tags for one subject and level: your A2 English tags, your B1-B2 exam preparation tags, your Bachillerato tags. You can build and edit your own Collections, then attach a course to the ones it uses. From then on, when you tag a question in that course, the picker offers only those Collections, plus the course’s own loose tags. You see this course’s tags, not everything you have ever typed. Yes, it would be nicer if someone handed you a finished set. But a set you built yourself matches your syllabus, and you only build it once. And if you would rather not bother, loose tags still work as they always did.
Look-alike tags are told apart on sight. Every tag in a Collection shows its Collection beside it, so two Listening tags from two subjects sit side by side and stay separate. A tag that belongs to no Collection is marked (loose).
Loose tags have one home. A single view lists every loose tag, with one click to file each into a Collection. This is where my four present simples went to be sorted out.
Importing a course asks before it acts. When a course arrives from a file, a short dialog tells you which tags it recognised, which Collections it proposes to attach, and which tags it would have to create as loose. Nothing is saved until you agree. You can say no.
Removing a Collection is protected. If you try to detach a Collection from a course that still uses its tags, the Editor refuses and names the tags in use.
The import dialog exists because it happened to us
We imported an Italian course we are writing. The importer saw A1 and quietly chose the English A1 Collection. Every Italian question would have been filed under English, and nothing would have looked wrong until a search returned the wrong exercises. Now the dialog shows you that choice and waits.
The part you will never see
Under all of this, every tag has a permanent identity that is not its spelling. The words are only a display name.
That one decision is what makes the rest safe. Rename a tag and every question keeps it, because the questions point to the identity, not the words. Export a course and the file carries those identities, so importing it on another computer reconnects to the same tags instead of creating copies.
Who this is really for
Honestly, tags are the boring feature. If you teach one course, you will notice none of this, and that is the point.
If you write across levels, subjects or programmes, this is what lets you search five years of material and quickly find what you need to reuse, remix and republish.
Today all of this lives in the Editor, on the authoring side. The next step is making tags useful in the classroom too, for example seeing which tag a group is weak on. That work has not started, but it is where this is going.
Lesson Commons is in free beta. If you would like to try it: lessoncommons.com/beta.
Lesson Commons is an educational software platform for teachers and trainers. The editor, delivery platform, and open transfer format (LC-JSON) are in active development. Follow our updates at lessoncommons.com/news.
This article was written with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic). The author defined the purpose, audience, and main ideas, contributed the personal teaching experience, directed the research and editorial approach, and edited the final text. Claude assisted with research, brainstorming, a first draft, and fact-checking every claim against what the software actually does.