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!

When? Where? What?

One of the important things that we need to manage, as class members and professors, is the D4SB course calendar. Since both students and teachers have a busy schedule, the calendar outline is fixed months before, yet the details are rather flexible and open to change.
However, we have found a way to make use of that flexibility and the available collaborative tools in order to collectively share and edit the course calendar.
I have already initiated a google calendar, with different layers for different classes. Professors can share their personal course schedule and all coworkers can have access to the information. Details such as name of class, professor, subject to be covered, location, class hours and even tasks can be uploaded and shared on this platform.
Updating the calendar is an on-going process so let’s try to keep it alive and as accurate as possible!