I’m not sure that any school can get along without a robust shared calendar, or a full set of them! Google Calendar certainly fills that bill, and provides the flexibility that a school needs for almost any activity.

From the individual teacher’s perspective, your own personal calendar is the way to start. Color code this in your favorite color and include any and all of your private or family events. When adding your appointments, social events, special dates, and more, you will find the portability of a digital calendar to be enormously helpful, especially if you live by your smartphone.

The next thing to do is add the calendar of your family members. Sharing the calendar with a spouse and having all family events located in a digital area goes a long way to keeping a family organized. If you have school-age children who use Google Classroom, you can also add their shared calendars. This will help keep you up-to-date with their assignment due dates and special events!

Next, our district created a public calendar for each building. These included important school dates like conferences, PTA meetings, and anything we wanted the public to be aware of. Not only is this calendar posted on the front page of the website, it also can be added to anyone’s personal Google calendar with the click of the “plus” button on the bottom of the calendar. And with permissions granted by the network manager there is no concern about having the wrong people add, edit or delete events.

However, the real power of calendars comes when they are used to schedule meetings and activities. Begin by creating a meeting date. In this menu you can add attachments, such as agendas, that are shared with all members of the group. If these attachments are shared Google Docs they can be used during the meeting for note-taking. In this menu you can also set up reminders for the meeting, either through email or through pop-ups, scheduled days, hours, or minutes in advance. Each person you add to the meeting can indicate whether or not they will attend the meeting, too, so there shouldn’t be any surprises that day.

Google Calendars are also great tools to use for scheduling technology, classrooms, and more. The online access makes them easy for people to view, so communication is clear and easy. If you’re not using Google Calendars in your school you will certainly want to try them out today!