Google Calendar: Getting it Right.

Now that we’ve initiated our shared course calendars, let’s move on to explore some of the many features and gadgets Google Calendar offers to help organize ourselves and keep track of important events.

The first interesting feature is that we can embed our calendar as a widget on our blog. Since we all have full editing capabilities on our D4SB calendars, every time one of us makes a change, the calendar is updated in real time on our blog. Google Calendar also allows us to view the calendar in day, week, month or agenda mode. For visibility and coherency's sake, we decided to stick with agenda view.

Another attractive feature is that Google calendar allows you to automatically add other public calendars such as sports events, television shows or holidays. I’ve added the Italian public holidays on our calendar, it could come in handy for planning vacations ahead of time!

Another useful feature is the weather forecast. It appears very discreetly as an icon on the calendar indicating whether it’s going to be sunny, rainy, or cloudy on that specific day in addition to a couple of days in advance.

Google Calendar also provides its users with customizable reminder options so as not to forget events. We can allow Google Calendar to send reminders via SMS to our cell phones. As a scheduled event draws near, Google Calendar can send an alert via SMS to our registered phone number. If we don’t want to push it that far, but still need that reminder, we can be notified of an upcoming event via email or a pop-up window.

There are limitless other features and gadgets that we can insert in our calendar such as google maps for indicating event locations or images for references, so feel free to explore and make that calendar not only functional but also interesting to browse!