3 Important Google Calendar Tips Every Teacher Should Know about

September 9, 2015
Google Calendar can be of tremendous help in enhancing your teaching productivity and facilitating your overall instructional workflow. As a teacher, you can use Calendar for different purposes. For example, you can use it to create events and share them with your students and parents; or  use it to share important dates and information with students. You can also create reminders about assignments and share them with your class. Check out these video tutorials to learn more about how to use Google Calendar.

Also, below are three important tips to keep in mind when using Google Calendar. The tips relate to the use of Events from Gmail, sharing calendars with a group of collaborators and customizing Calendar settings to control the visibility of your calendars and what others can do with them.

1- Events from Gmail
Any email you receive with an event included (e.g a flight, an appointment…etc) is automatically added to you Google Calendar. Gmails events added to your Calendar are only visible to you, even if you share your calendar with others they won’t be able to see them.  However, if  you no longer want events from Gmail added to you Calendar you can easily deactivate this feature by changing the default setting. Here is how to do it on your computer:

• Open Google Calendar.
• Click the settings gear in the top right .
• Select Settings.
• Find the Events from Gmail section (stay in the "General" tab).
• Uncheck Add automatically.

2- Share Calendars with a group of people
Google Calendar allows you to create different types of calendars to which you can apply different sharing settings. For instance, you can create a calendar that multiple people can edit. This is particularly helpful when you are working on a collaborative project with co-workers.  As the creator and owner of the calendar, you get the admin privileges of deciding how others can see your events. You can also control what others can do with your calendar in terms of editing and adding events to it. Some of the things you can allow collaborators to do on your calendar include: Make changes and manage sharing, Make changes to events, See all event details, and See free/busy information (no details).
Here is how to share your calendars with others and change permission settings:

• Open Google Calendar on a computer.
• On the left, find  My Calendars. You may need to click to expand it.
• Find the calendar you want to share and click the arrow next to it.
• Menu on hover over calendar name
• Select Share this Calendar.
• Under Share with specific people, add the email address of the person you want to share with.
• For Permission Settings, choose an option in the drop-down menu. Click Add person, if they aren't already added.
• Click Save.

Once you click Save, the person you shared your calendar with will get an email invitation to view your calendar. If they click the link in the email, your calendar will be added to their "Other calendars" list.

3- Change the privacy settings for your event
By default, any event you create on your Calendar has the same privacy settings as your calendar. However, you do have the ability to change what others can see about any of your events. Here is how to change the privacy settings of your events:

• On your computer, open Google Calendar.
• Click the event you want to update.
• At the bottom of the page, find the Visibility section.
• Choose the privacy setting for the event.
• At the top of the page, click Save.

Source: Google Calendar Help page.

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