Google Calendar wins, hands down

An online class calendar is the best way for high school teachers to take advantage of their web presence and achieve transparency between the classroom and their students’ learning outside of the classroom. Students who can check homework assignments, project requirements and test due dates at home will learn more than those who cannot. Teachers writing assignments on the board, forcing students to use their paper planners are preparing their students for a world that no longer exists. If there are any work environments that still require that skill they will be out of business before these kids graduate. These students, especially hyper-scheduled millennials, need the ability to manage their schedule electronically.

On the teacher side, the maintenance of a calendar is yet another chrono-vampire, ready to suck time out of an already overtaxed schedule. Or is it?

Teachers use a variety of methods to keep track of what they are doing. Some plan their class schedules on napkins, some use desk calendars, and others use picture perfect, graduate school template lesson plans. To eliminate the time drain of an online class calendar, teachers need a tool to direct this planning to a calendar that be used for both planning and announcing. There are many calendars available to teachers, but only Google calendar presents the perfect solution to online class calendars.

Most of the companies that design calendars as part of teacher and school websites seem clueless to the basic workflow of a teacher. Teachers with five sections of two preps often have to duplicate events across five calendars. They don’t have the time to click between five different monthly calendars; they need to see all five class events in one month, toggling on and off each class. They need to copy events from one section to others with less than three clicks. They need to make the class calendar open to both students and parents. It would also help if the calendar could send e-mail reminders that take less than two clicks to activate.

Would it be too much to ask if the calendar generated a feed that could appear in the teacher’s reader, or better yet, their internet home page? It’s probably too much to ask that the calendar allow students to incorporate one teacher’s class schedule with another teacher’s schedule and their athletic team schedule. For every education calendar system available, the answers to these questions is “No”. For Google Calendar, the answer to all is “YES!”

Using a Google account, teachers can create a separate calendar for each of their class sections. They can post and copy events or change dates with ease. There is no other calendar that better fits the workflow of a high school teacher.

Google eclipses all other calendar systems with its ability to be embeded in any other web site. Google earns billions because it is simple to use. With just a click, copy and paste, teachers can throw some gobbly-gook code into their website and voila, their class calendar appears on their teacher page in the school’s website. They can even put it on other learning environments like Moodle. Once the calendar is embedded, the teacher never has to worry about it, all of the work they put on their own calendar, with automatically appear wherever it is embedded, they never have to see the code again.

Students, creating their own Google account, can “add” a teacher’s class calendar to their own. By putting the calendar on their customized iGoogle page, their class assignments are always right in from of them. Students athletes who know what they are doing can grab their team’s schedule from one of those high school sports scheduling sites and put their games and practices right alongside their assignments.

Experienced teachers can grab a csv file from the company that makes the student planner or the school’s web site and throw that into a Google calendar as well. Teachers and students can also add this calendar to their own, schoolwide events can appear alongside their classes and athletic teams.

On the skill side, the sweet spot it students gaining experience navigating different scheduling systems and applications. Of course the ones available to them as adults will be radically different that the ones they use now. But the more they learn, the easier it will be to learn more later.

On the pedagogy side, the sweet spot is detailed descriptions for every class period. Why should class objectives and goals be hidden in the teacher’s lesson plan binder when they should be read by the students?

On the education side, every dollar spent by school districts on sterile, inflexible and difficult to manage calendar systems peddled by edtech industry thieves could be donated to rebuilding inner-city schools.

Google calendar wins.