Small Strokes Big Oaks

Today’s post is a video tutorial I created that will show you, in 5 minutes, how to create a Google Calendar that you can share with your students in order to show them what is going on in your classroom.  This calendar will be complete with attachments that you can upload to give them notes, assignments, or whatever you want.

To view this video, click on the play button in the middle of the video below.  If you want to make it full screen, click on the little monitor button on the bottom, right corner of the video.  A transcript for the video is after the jump.

(Also, I’m hoping to make these 5-minute technology tutorials a regular thing, so if you like this one or have suggestions for improvement, please leave them in the comments or email me at ashley@equality101.net!)

Video transcript: (This isn’t an exact transcript; I edited out lots of the placeholders (“umm…” “like…” starting sentences with conjunctions) that I use frequently to give you a more pleasant reading experience.)

Hi! Ashley here from Equality 101 and today I’m going to be showing you how to create a Google Calendar that you can upload documents to and use to share information with your students. First things first, you need a Google account; that could be a Gmail account. If you already have a Gmail account, that’s great. If you don’t, you’re going to need to make one. Your students are not going to need it to view the calendar, but you need it to create the calendar. Once you have that Google account, go ahead and log in on http://calendar.google.com and that will take you to your calendar. You can already see that I have a few here going – going strong in the first couple days of school. Then, you’re going to have to create your calendars.  You can go ahead and click “Add” to add the calendar. For calendar name, this will just be my test calendar. I’m going to then kind of scroll down and check “Make this calendar public.” If it’s not public, your students are not going to be able to see it. Then click “Create calendar” and, yes you are totally sure that you want to share this calendar with the world. Eventually, here, this will show up as “Test;” this is going to be orange. Then, what you want to do is you want to go into the settings and into calendar settings click “Labs” and scroll down to “Event Attachments.” Make sure that’s enabled. That’s what’s going to let you upload documents to your calendar, so make sure you’ve clicked enabled on that, and click save, and that’s going to enable attachments for all of your calendars. Once that’s enabled, what you’re really uploading are Google Docs, so you’re going to want to open a new window or tab and go to http://docs.google.com and you’re already logged in, so it will just take you there. You can see that I already have a few documents uploaded here, but let’s say you want to upload a new document for this particular calendar. Go over here and click “Upload,” and “Select files to upload.” Let’s say you want to upload the rubric for this eulogy speech – my students give a eulogy speech about a cartoon character and it’s really funny. You’re going to go ahead and you can click a destination folder; mine is going into the English 2 folder. You also want to make sure that you change the privacy settings to “Public on the web” because, again, if it’s not public, your students are not going to be able to see it. So go ahead and start that upload, and it’s going to upload there. Then, you can go back to your calendar and you can create this assignment for Monday by just double clicking the date. I would just go right ahead into “Edit event details.” You could title it Eulogy, then repeat it if necessary, pick which calendar you want to put it in – I’m going to put it into the Test calendar that I just showed you I created. You can then type out a description that is as detailed or as not detailed as you want. Then what you’re going to do is click “Add attachment” and this is going to pull up a list of all your Google Documents that you have uploaded to your account. I’ve got my eulogy rubric right here; that’s what I want to upload so I go ahead and click that and click “Select” and it’s going to attach it right there. Then, you can check and make sure all of your settings are good and click “Save” once you have everything the way you want it. And there it is right on your calendar on Monday. You can click on it and see the details or edit it again if you need. You can copy it into another calendar if you want. If you want to do that, go into “Edit event details” again, go up to “More Actions” and select “Copy to…” whatever calendar you want. Then, you go back into your calendars here, you go into “Settings,” then “Calendar settings,” go to calendars, click the calendar that you’re working on and you’ll see all of these settings. You can embed it using a code. You can get an HTML code which will give you a link you can share with your students. If you click on that link, you can see what the students see. If you click on the Eulogy event, you can see the description and if you click on “More details,” they can actually go in and download the eulogy.doc which is exactly what you want them to see because that’s how they are going to be graded. And that is how, in a quick five minutes, you create a Google Calendar that your students can see and download assignments from so you can keep them informed as your class progresses throughout the year. Good luck!