JCamargo / Pixabay

 

Editor’s Note: Yesterday, Kara Synhorst wrote a guest post titled GUEST POST TUTORIAL: CONNECTING GOOGLE CLASSROOM TO YOUR CALENDAR SO STUDENTS CAN MAKE APPOINTMENTS. Here, today, she presents Part Two, where she discusses ways to use the Google Classroom calendar feature.

 

Kara Synhorst teaches IB English and Theory of Knowledge at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento.

 

In the Spring of 2020, we transitioned very suddenly to distance learning. At the time, teachers were using many different formats for communicating with students, and most of us stuck with what we knew.

I have been using Google Classroom for several years, so it was a fairly seamless transition for me. All my students were already members of our Classroom, so I could instantly send out notices and assignments.

Now that we are moving to distance learning, but hopefully in a more thoughtful manner, I’m going to advocate for using the Google Classroom because of one of my favorite features: the calendar.

To show you what I like about it, I created a new class. I then created an assignment.

Then I logged into my daughter’s district account, and I added my classroom using the Class code.

Once she was a student in my class, my sample assignment appeared on her Google calendar.

There are two ways for students to access their calendar. First, they can go to their Google Drive and click the Calendar. Second, they could go to any of their Google Classrooms, click “Classwork,” and then click “Google Calendar.”

If a student happened to have my class and Mr. Ferlazzo’s class and belonged to both classrooms, opening their calendar would show them both of our assignments, no matter which way they accessed the calendar.

As a test, I made an assignment due on May 20th. Here’s a screenshot of my daughter’s calendar. You can see my test assignment as well as her actual 6th grade teacher’s assignments. (I changed the color-coding of my class to purple to more easily distinguish it, but I did that from her account. It’s something students could choose to do if they wish.)

I hope the value of this is obvious. As a student, you could see every upcoming assignment laid out for the week or month, color-code it if you choose, easily click links to the instructions in the Google Classroom, and plan your time accordingly. I think if a student has teachers who are consistently using Google Classroom and we teach students how to access and use the calendar, we have a great tool on our hands for organization and time management.