Instead of making a long-range planner in Microsoft Word again, I made a Google Calendar for this coming year’s Danville Public Schools traditional-calendar dates:
I’ve been using Google Calendar a lot this year for keeping track of personal dates. It syncs perfectly with the calendar app on my iPod touch, so it’s handy, and I love being able to have a lot of calendars with different colored items that I can view or hide at a click.
In my personal calendar, I’ve labeled the weekends that Mr. Hawke is off, for example, since his schedule at the prison is so screwy I can’t keep up with it in my head to plan in advance. (One week he’s off Wednesday and Thursday, and the next week he’s off every day but Wednesday and Thursday, and repeat forever — even on holidays. :()
I’ve also set up a separate calendar for our travels this summer. You can add links to websites, addresses, and hours of operation under the events’ details. Pretty cool!
My personal calendars are private, but the DPS calendar above is shared with everyone.
I embedded it here easily by just copying and pasting the code from the calendar’s “details.”
Here are some great things about embedding Google Calendars that I’ve discovered:
- You can embed the calendar in as many websites as you like.
- Whenever you change anything to your calendar, all embedded calendars are automatically updated.
- It’s viewable — and printable! — in three formats: Week, Month, and Agenda, which the user can select at a click.
- When you click on an event, you can add it to your own Google calendar.
And here are just a few ways using Google Calendars could benefit schools, teachers and parents:
- Parents could access the dates report cards are coming out via their mobile apps.
- School secretaries could easily change activities calendars and sports calendars without having to re-export and email the latest versions to everybody.
- Teachers and parents could copy district and/or school events to their own Google Calendars.
Now that I’ve written all this and considered these possibilities, I’m thinking that using a Google Calendar on my website for my classes to keep up with due dates and make-up work would be a great idea! I can copy assignments from my planning calendar to the student calendar and make adjustments as necessary.
I’d love to hear about your experiences using this technology!
© 2010, mrshawke-dot-com.
Most of my teaching resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License, which means you can feel free to use them with attribution as long as you don’t use them commercially. If you’re not sure, don’t hesitate to ask me. Unfortunately, I am currently unable to send out my tests and quizzes, but I am hoping to establish a less time-consuming alternative for this in the near future. Sorry!!
