Tech for Teacher Admin.

Problem: How can I make my life more organized?


Knowledge
One of the hardest things about being a teacher, for me, is staying organized. School activities, parent conferences, special guests, assessments, etc. are hard to keep track of...now add being a mom of 2 into the equation: doctor appointments, sports, school, birthday parties, etc. I was finding it hard to balance all “the things”. That’s when my co-workers and I came across Google Calendar. It is a free app you can download on your phone, computer, iPad, etc., you just need to create a google account.


Google Calendar is a great app for basically everything:
-appointments
-events
-alerts
-reminders

-organization


My research has found that Google Calendar is very user friendly. One feature is that you can sync/share different calendars with different people. For example, I have my work calendar on my app (which I share with my co-workers), and I also have my family calendar (which I share with my husband). This allows me to see everything I have going on in one place. You can also color code each calendar so they are separate from each other.








I use green for my school calendar and blue for my family. This makes seeing the different calendars much easier. It is also great that my husband and I can just look at our shared calendar to see upcoming events/appts. This way we do not double book anything.

I also found that with Google Calendar you can set up alerts for appts/events, but you can also have an email sent to you every morning with an overview of your day’s tasks/appts/events. If you forget to look at your calendar, it is a nice feature to have an email sent directly to you so that you do not miss anything.









Application
My co-workers and I have implemented using Google Calendar into our classroom. We use it for event reminders, parent conferences, if someone took the day off, etc. But, for our classroom, the most important thing we use Google Calendar for is that when we have a special guest coming (science, yoga, art), we put into our shared calendar how many spaces are available for students to add. For example, if we have yoga class our calendar will read: Yoga - 5 spaces available. Then, if parents want to add that special event, all teachers have access to add in a child. This helps so that we are never out of ratio.


You can see in the image below that for Art with Ms. Amy we have 3 spaces available. For lego club, we have 0. This allows all teachers access to add and subtract students if need be and helps us know how many children we have at all times.






Reflection on Practice
Of course when using apps for organization the problem of “it’s not working” will arise. Maybe your phone didn’t charge last night or your computer is dead. Google Calendar allows you to access it from anywhere as long as you have Internet access. You simply just log into your google account and you can use the calendar. (If you used iCalendar for Apple you would not have this feature).