Google Calendar

This week, I decided to explore Google Calendar. I often have a very difficult time with organizational skills. I try using a planner every semester, but often I stop writing in it after the first few weeks of school. For my job, I usually have a lot of small projects going on, so I often write down lists of things that I need to do as I think of them on a scrap piece of paper. However, often because this is just on a piece of loose-leaf paper, I do loose it rather easily.

One of the people that I work with loves using Google calendar, and so I have been wanting to look into this to see if it would assist with my organizational skills. When I sat down and began creating this calendar, I discovered a lot of features that I really liked. First, this calendar has a lot of really intuitive features. For example, for events like classes, it gives you the option of selecting that the event will occur on Monday, Wednessday, Friday, or Tuesday, Thursday. You can also select that the event will happen daily, every other day, weekly, twice a week, etc. That way I don't have to go through and write in Every single time that I have TE 401 manually. My calendar will go through and fill in every class period of TE 401 if I tell it to. I also liked that I could color code my events. Therefore I could pick one color for my work events, one for my school events, and one for extra-curriculars.

One of my favorite features of Google Calendar is that it allows me to create tasks on my calendar. There is also a task list that pops up to the right of my calendar. The tasks have a little box next to them that I can check when I have completed them and Google Calendar will draw a line through the tasks that I have completed. This way I can visually see that I am accomplishing these things.

I think that using this feature of Google could be something that would really help me organizationally, and I might be more apt to use it since I am on my computer a lot for class and work. Also, I wouldn't have to carry around a planner with me at all times. I like that I have the option of accessing my Google Calendar on my phone because I pretty much have my phone on me at all times so it would be easy for me to check my calendar any time that I needed to. I also like that I can have my Google Calendar send me reminders via email or text if I think that I am going to forget to complete a task or go to an event that is on my calendar.

Overall, I think that in my teaching career, this would really help me because I am going to need to be constantly organized in order to have my lessons prepared and ready to go for my students. I will need to remember to grade certain papers and tests so that I can get them back to my students in an efficient time manner. I will also need to remember when parent teacher conferences are and when IEP and professional development meetings will be held. These are all things that Google Calendar could help me with.

I also think that young students may have fun using Google Calendar to learn about how to read and use calenders in their daily lives. I believe that you could really engage students by using this technology to look at phases of the moon. You could also incorporate Google Calendar into math to figure out how many days until the students favorite holiday. Overall, I think that I mostly see using this form of technology for myself as a teacher, but it definitely has applications for my students as well!