The Electric Educator: Using Google Calendar for Lesson Planning

Monday, February 1, 2010

Using Google Calendar for Lesson Planning

Google calendar is a great tool. My wife and I have been using it for over a year to keep track of our family activities. A new feature currently in calendar labs adds the ability to attach a Google Doc to a calendar event. This makes using Google Calendar for lesson planning a powerful tool. After create a lesson or unit, you can share your calendar and relevant documents with other teachers in your building or district, fostering collaboration.

Here's a quick tutorial on lesson planning with Google Calendar.

Note: one thing that I forgot to mention is that if you share a calendar that has attached documents, you must give those people permission to view/edit your shared documents. Sharing the calendar does NOT automatically give them permission to view/edit the attached documents.

19 comments:

  1. Thanks for the comment, Alison. Here are a couple of elementary applications that I came up with:

    * Collaborative planning with grade level teachers.
    * Class birthday calendar.
    * General lesson calendar to share with parents.

    I threw your question out to my Twitter PLN. I'll let you know what they say!

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  2. Nice idea.
    Question, does your school/district have a specific lesson plan format? I am always looking for ideas and examples of lesson plan formats.
    Thanks

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  3. No, teachers at my school are not required to turn in lesson plans. We're on our own!

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  4. Have you found a way to reschedule a lesson for future usage, or do you recreate each lesson every year/semester?

    What you have shown so far is great! However, I'd like to be able to make comments on the lesson/unit and reuse/edit/add to it year after year.

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    1. I use OneNote to store all of my lesson plans. Whatever I want to teach, I just copy and past them in for that day.

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  5. Christopher,

    You could set each lesson as a repeating event scheduled to repeat on the same day every year. Personally, I don't use Calendar to do detailed planning, I just put in my units and tests days for quick reference. If I was team planning I might add more detail/attach documents.

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  6. I do not see the instructions, sorry if this is a user error, sorry ;)

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  7. @creative chaos

    Were you able to view the embedded YouTube video? If not, you can access it directly: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wH-6vM61LaI

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  8. I love this! Thank you. I'm wondering if I could embed a google calendar to my community Ed/preschool website. Can you help me with this?

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  9. Hi Becky, yes, any website that allows iframe code should accept a Google Calendar.

    Open up the "details" of the calendar that you want to embed. Toward the bottom of the page there is a box with a HTML code. Simply copy the code and paste it into your blog and your calendar will appear!

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  10. I have been using Google Calendar for a couple years now to collaborate with my co-teacher and so I don't have to carry a bulky lesson plan book around. I write what we are doing in the Event Details section but find it cumbersome that I have to click the event and view details daily to see what I had planned. I would love to be able to be in the week view and see all of my details for each day. Is there a way to do that? Thanks

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  11. Hi Cindy!

    Your best bet is to use the "custom" view option. You can determine how many days you want to see at a time. This will give you an expanded view, but won't show all of the details. You can setup your custom view by accessing your calendar settings.

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  12. Great idea! I was able to create a calendar for my writing class but it is overlapping with my personal/family calendar. How do I separate them?

    Thank you.

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  13. I'm giving this a try - thanks for the idea.

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  14. I dont have an option to attach from google docs. Is that because I do not have a google docs account?

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  15. This is an awesome resource. Our school has gone 1:1 in grades 3 - 5 this year, and all of our teachers have an iPad. I'll definitely share this with them. I have also linked this blog post from my website: www.iteachteacherstech.com. Thanks so much for sharing!

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  16. I feel like my life is going to be simplified.

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  17. Very useful information!

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