Google Calendar

I've dabbled with Google Calendar many-a-time over the last few years. Since almost all of my devices are Apple products, I've had issues in the past with sync capabilities and seamless sharing. This week I took a deeper dive into the inner workings of Google Calendar to see what was new and how I could make this tool work better for me. (If you are new to Google Calendar, click HERE for a walk through on how to get started)

I started out on a mission to create a basic school calendar with building wide events as well as games and practice schedules. The initial goal was to then be able to share this calendar out with my students as well as their parents so everyone would be on the same page for when I would be available and what was going on in the upcoming weeks. I am the girls' basketball coach in my building so staying after school to work with students is sometimes tough with a hectic practice and game schedule. This calendar would help both students and parents see my availability during the season. What started out as a well intentioned idea, quickly became EXTREMELY frustrating as I realized that my district restricts viewing on Google Calendars created from a district account to ONLY those within the domain. This means that I would be able to share this calendar with my students, but parents would not have access to the calendar. After a few hours of trying work-arounds, I realized there was no way I could make this a reality. My tip for ANYONE creating a calendar they are wishing to share outside of their domain is to first check your settings to see if sharing to recipients is even an option for you. I created the video below to show you how to quickly do this with any Google Calendar you have created or that has been shared with you.

Because this was such a headache and I had to play with settings and options, I did learn a couple of new tricks in Google Calendar! (Silver Lining!) The first trick I stumbled across is customizing the calendar view that you can embed into other websites. This is fantastic because you can control the size of the calendar based on pixels and can even scale it down to where it looks pretty dang good on a mobile phone. See the screen grab below on how to do this. 

The second tip that I stumbled across when trying to figure a way out of this headache was that you can now export your Google Calendar to a .ICAL file. This is HUGE for Apple users everywhere. What this means is that you can now export a Google Calendar directly to your iCal app on your MacBook, iPhone, and iPad. I tried it with the new calendar I created and it works perfectly. This would be an AMAZINGLY easy way to send the calendar directly to my students who all have iPads this year. I could create a calendar for each unit and email it to students OR simply upload it to Google Classroom and then students would simply download the file and it would automatically sync with their iCal app on their iPads. I am SO happy that this feature now exists and feel that I truly will use Google Calendar more now that I know it is more cooperative with Apple products! To learn more about exporting your Google Calendars to the .ICAL file type, click HERE!