Friday 4 July 2014

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

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