Google Calendar Application to Education: Part 3

Plan a Course Curriculum and Schedule

Calendar is an essential skill in the process of learning and one of the core tools required for Google Educators. To effectively teach your students, you’ll need to understand how Calendar is applied for teaching and learning. To begin, review this lesson and complete the video.

You will learn:

• How to plan a course curriculum and schedule using Calendar

Create and use lesson plans using Calendar

Planning and organizing your curriculum on a semester, monthly or even a daily basis can be a hassle. Yet staying on schedule with your class(es) and related lesson plans can lead to dramatic increases in student learning and your efficiency as a teacher. Many educators are now using Google Calendar to:

Plan curriculum per class, subject and semester

Organize student activities such as reading assignments, group or team reviews and project time

Guide new or temporary educators, as well as use as Professional Development templates

Provide access to school administration, peers and parents so everyone has visibility into their children’s education and tasks.

Learn more from these two teacher videos on how to leverage Google Calendar for organizing your curriculum and developing more robust lesson plans!

Video 1:

Video 2:

Reference: GOOGLE

Google Calendar Application to Education: Part 2

Increase Communication and Collaboration

Calendar is an essential skill in the process of learning and one of the core tools required for Google Educators. To effectively teach your students, you’ll need to understand how Calendar is applied for teaching and learning. To begin, review this lesson and complete the video.

You will learn:

• How to increase communication and collaboration amongst all members of the school community

Use Google Calendar for your school schedule

A calendar can be created with Google Calendar to mirror the information usually printed in a school academic calendar. This could include events such as:

• First/last days of classes
• School vacations
• Finals/mid-term weeks
• Teacher in-service days

Creating a school-wide academic calendar is done in the same way as creating any secondary calendar. The sharing settings for a school-wide academic calendar will be very broad.

The following training video gives more details:

Using Google Calendar for class projects and as a student

Sometimes it can be helpful to separate long-term project assignments from the general class schedule. For example, if there is an end-of-year research paper and presentation, it might be helpful to have a separate “Research project” calendar that has all the due dates and milestones for the project. Then the project calendar can be viewed on its own. It is easy to find the information because it won’t get lost in all the events scheduled in the class calendar.

Another example of a way you could use a special project calendar is when working on a group project. Group members can collaborate and share a calendar together so everyone can have access to the project meeting times, project deadlines and milestones, and other project related activities (going out to do a survey/market research, conducting an interview, etc).

The use of Calendar for class projects is fairly identical to how students can equally save time and become more efficient and successful learners. Check out this teacher-built video to learn more.

Now watch the following Video Tutorial:

Reference: GOOGLE

Google Calendar Application in Education: Part 1

Increase Productivity and Classroom Management Skills

Calendar is an essential skill in the process of learning and one of the core tools required for Google Educators. To effectively teach your students, you’ll need to understand how Calendar is applied for teaching and learning. To begin, review this lesson and complete the training video below.

You will learn:

• How to use Calendar to increase productivity and efficiency

Google Calendar is an outstanding tool to leverage in your role as an educator or school administrator. This includes adding student assignments, copying assignments, attaching class or project files and creating work folders.

While your Google Apps school account automatically creates a primary calendar for you, it can be useful to have several additional calendars to help organize the different parts of your life. The primary calendar that comes with your Google Apps account will be associated with the name and email address of your account. However, you can create as many secondary calendars as you like. For example, you might want to have a school/work calendar that has all the events and appointments related to school (staff meetings, school events, conferences). In addition, you may want to have a separate personal calendar for keeping track of events and appointments outside of work (a doctor appointment, dinner with a friend, exercise class).

These different calendars not only allow you to see different information on your calendar (you can choose a color for school and a different color for personal), but also let you set different privacy settings for the calendars. This allows everyone at your school to see your school/work calendar, while not allowing anyone to have access to your personal calendar.

Watch the following Video Tutorial:

Sharing Google Calendar with teachers and students

Besides creating a personal calendar to help organize your own activities and priorities, it can be useful to create calendars to share information across groups of people. Here are some examples of group calendars that could be used at your school:

• Class calendar for class-related events such as activities, class meeting times, testing schedules and lesson objectives
• Homework calendar with detailed descriptions of homework assignments, links to relevant materials and due dates
• School-wide holiday or academic schedule with in-service days, holidays and other scheduling anomalies
• Group project deadlines and milestones for a group or team to track workload
• School sporting event schedules that can be shared with the entire school

Calendar sharing options in Google Apps:

If you use your personal email address with Google Calendar, you have the option to keep a calendar private or to share it. However, with Calendar for Google Apps you have a third sharing option. You can choose to keep a calendar private, to share it with the world, or to only share it with members of your domain. If you share it with members of your domain, the calendar can only be accessed with those who have an “@your_school.edu’ account.

With the sharing options available, it is easy to create a school calendar with varying levels of access – you can specify certain users that can make changes, others that can only see the calendar, or set a broad access setting for the public or individuals at your school.

The following are the different types of access levels you can grant to individuals, users at your school and the public (everyone in the world). Please note: If you don't see all of these options, you may need to speak with your domain administrator to enable these features.

• Completely private calendar: You can set your calendar to be completely private so that none of your calendar information, not even free/busy information, will be available to anyone except those people you specifically add to share your calendar. You can use this setting for the entire world (Do not share with everyone) and/or for your school Apps domain (Do not share with everyone in my domain).

• Limited calendar view (free/busy information): Sometimes you want people to be able to check your schedule and see only the times you're busy. In the free/busy view, someone will only see blocks of time marked as busy for times when you have entries in your calendar. They will not be able to see the name of the event or any of the event details.This view can be useful to share as an appointment availability calendar that you could share with students or parents. This way the students or parents could see when you are available without knowing any of the details of your schedule.

• Full calendar view (show all event details): With this setting, other users can see your calendar and events and invite you to events, but cannot see events on your calendar that have been marked as private. This is a common view for school-related calendars that are shared with users at your school domain. For that calendar, your colleagues or students would be able to see the events and details, but you could also add private events such as conferences or sensitive meetings that cannot be viewed by colleagues or students at your school.

• Full calendar access (make changes to events): This setting is for sharing with individuals only. You can add specific people to a calendar who have access to see and change all events, including private ones. This can be useful for team calendars as it grants multiple people the ability to add and edit events on a single calendar. For example, a team project calendar could function better if each of the team members could check availability and add meetings instead of just one person. It would also allow the team members to edit the events, allowing each person to add to event descriptions, like an agenda. 

Please note: You cannot grant someone outside your domain this level of access to your primary calendar (this is the calendar created by default with your Google Apps account). However, any secondary calendars can be shared, such as a calendar created specifically for homework, school projects, school sporting events, etc.

• Full calendar ownership (Make changes to events AND manage sharing): The final privilege you can grant is the ability to manage sharing access for a calendar. This setting also is for sharing with individuals only. With this setting, an individual would essentially become an owner of the calendar, as they would be able to add, remove and edit events as well as add, remove and edit the sharing settings of the calendar. This is a setting to be treated with care. For example, someone with this permission setting would be able to change the sharing-access level of individuals or change if the calendar is viewable to the domain or public.

Please note: You cannot grant someone outside your domain this level of access to your primary calendar

Now watch the following Video tutorial:

Printing calendars and events

Sometimes it's handy to have a printout of your calendar to take with you when you don't have a computer. To print a calendar or multiple calendars, these are the typical steps to use:

• Make sure the calendar(s) you wish to print are selected in the calendar list to the left of your calendar window
• Select the view that you would like to print: Day, Week, Month, 4 Day, or Agenda
• After selecting print, a Print Settings menu will appear in a new window. Basic options for your printed calendar:

1. Print range: Select the dates you would like to print of your calendar
2. Font size/Orientation: Choose the size of the font and the orientation of your calendar (landscape/portrait)
3. Events you have declined: Choose to have events appear even if you have declined
4. Black/White: Check if you want to print in black and white
5. Agenda view only options:

               - Descriptions: If you would like to have all the details for your activities printed,

                 select the Print descriptions check box 

                 (Please note: this is not checked by default.)

               -End times

               -Attendees

               -My response

• Events you have declined

Start printing!

Please note: If you've scheduled a large number of events, your calendar may print on multiple pages to better display all your entries.

Now watch the following training Video:

Reference: GOOGLE

Google Calendar Basics

Introduction

The Google Calendar Basics lesson will introduce you to a fundamental basics of Google Calendar, its features and general benefits in the classroom. First, you can review this first lesson and then watch the video tutorial from a Google Certified Teacher.

In this lesson, you will learn:

• How to describe Calendar
• How to identify Calendar's main components
• What is the typical application of Calendar in the classroom
• How to identify the unique value to educators and teaching
• How to access supporting information

What is Calendar?

Google's free online Calendar helps you keep track of life’s important events, all in one place. Calendars can be shared school-wide or with select colleagues. You can overlay multiple calendars to see when people are available. Google Calendar is integrated into Gmail and compatible with popular calendar applications.

What features does Calendar have?

Google apps integration

Calendar integrates with other Google apps like Gmail, Hangouts and Drive. You can create a Hangout link in the calendar event and join from your computer, tablet or phone. Gmail allows you to RSVP to events without ever leaving your inbox. And attaching Drive files to events ensures that everyone has the materials they need.

Mobile calendar

The Calendar app for Android syncs across devices, so you can access your calendar no matter where you are. You can also access your calendar from any device with a web browser. This app lets you set up calendar notifications via SMS to receive reminders when you hit the road.

Offline support

The Calendar app for Chrome lets you view your class schedule and respond to invitations, even without an internet connection. Changes made to your calendar will be synced the next time you connect to the internet.

Share calendars

Using Google calendars makes it straightforward to share and collaborate on calendars with people in and outside of your organization. You can give access to one person, a group of parents, or even publish calendars on websites for all to refer to them. Calendars work with Google Groups, allowing everyone to edit. They automatically update when new members join or old members leave.

Security

Google Calendar is designed with a focus on security and reliability including features like encrypted connections to Google’s servers, simultaneous replicated storage for your calendar appointments and built-in disaster recovery.

Suggested tips for using Google Calendar in education

Google Calendar is free for schools. It helps you to easily share your calendar with your entire organization or select specific people. This makes scheduling really easy when you overlay calendars to find a time that is suitable to everyone’s agendas.

Google calendar also makes it very easy to schedule school events, send out invitations and let Google Calendar handle the RSVPs for you. This way students can effortlessly find time to meet up for school projects by using shared calendars.

Calendar integrates with other Google Apps, like Gmail, Hangouts and Drive. You can respond to invitations right from your inbox without visiting Calendar. You can also incorporate a Hangout link in calendar events and join the Hangout from the web or your phone. Furthermore, you can attach a Drive file to an event so that everyone has the agenda and knows the files that should be reviewed.

You can create a calendar for each class, and make it public. The calendar can incorporate class sessions, activities, assignments and their due dates, and exam schedules. Students (or parents) can subscribe to the calendar to view course information.

Watch video tutorial below:

Reference: GOOGLE