As August approaches, all too quickly perhaps, many academics begin to think about planning the fall semester.
Over the past year at ProfHacker, we’ve written some posts related to calendar and scheduling tools that you might want to revisit as you think about your goals and commitments for the upcoming academic year.
Choosing a Calendar
Jason wrote about using a paper-based planner that he reconciles with his online calendar. His discussion of online calendar features in On Letting Google Win convinced me to try out Google Calendar in preparation for switching to an Android device—like several other ProfHackers who’ve written about using Google with smartphones.
In Create Your Syllabus With a Spreadsheet and a Calendar App, George offers detailed instructions for using the spreadsheet feature of Google Docs with Google Calendar to create a dynamic, easily updatable version of your syllabus that can be displayed on your course webpage.
If thinking big (really big) is your thing, then check out Erin’s post on creating a calendar wall (and her follow-up).
What’s Coming Up for You?
In addition to your personal appointments and teaching schedule, you may wish to keep track of other kinds of deadlines throughout the academic year. In How to Keep Track of Academic Conferences Without Losing Your Mind, guest author Stan Kurkovsky wrote about online event aggregators that gather announcements and calls for papers for academic conferences in a variety of subject areas. Nels offered some excellent suggestions in Managing Grant and Fellowship Deadlines, which goes beyond just putting deadlines on your calendar to setting up project files and requesting references early.
Do You Need to Coordinate Your Schedule With Others?
As anyone who’s ever served on a committee knows, sometimes just finding a suitable meeting time can be more challenging than the actual decisions the committee has to make. George wrote an introduction to Doodle, which is, as he says, “a dead-simple and user-friendly service.” I’ve used it myself recently and was very pleased with how it helped me to schedule a meeting.
If you advise large numbers of students or hold individual conferences for a writing-based course, several posts have discussed online solutions to scheduling such appointments. George discussed Jiffle, admiring its attractive design, although noting that it sometimes confused students In a subsequent post, he admired the integration options available with Tungle. Recently, George noted some updates to Doodle and Tungle that might help readers better evaluate them. Also in the scheduling series, guest author Todd Stanfield offered a detailed discussion of Using Acuity for Student Appointments. Now, before you have to start meeting with students, would be a good time to try out one or more of these services and evaluate which one would serve you best.
Keep It Simple
If all this seems a bit too overwhelming, then just pull out a pad of sticky notes and follow Julie’s excellent advice: How 15 Minutes Can Save 24 Hours of Stress.
What questions do you have about calendars, scheduling, and planning for the academic year? Let us know in the comments and the ProfHacker team can try to address them in upcoming posts.
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3 Responses to From the Archives: Calendars and Scheduling
bikegrrr - July 13, 2010 at 7:53 am
Good advice, and it speaks to the empowered user. What’s significant here is that none of these tools requires the IT support group. These tools all exist in the cloud. The challenge is sharing calendars across the organization. The more people that use similar tools, the better. There is a growing and undeniable tug to the Google environment.
jmjohnso - July 19, 2010 at 11:34 am
Thank you for this. I’ve never commented before but playing with the syllabus-to-calendar trick led me to a quick new lifehack. I’ve tended to use Excel for project planning and long-term tasks (like writing an article) and use Toodledo for short-term (2 minutes according to the Getting Things Done tactic) to-dos. My Toodledo updates into my iCal by subscription. But I didn’t realize until I read the post above that I could also import my Excel project plans into Toodledo (and correspondingly into my iCal) with just a couple of clicks. Instead, I was working out my project plans in Excel (which I am more comfortable using) and then inserting each task manually into Toodledo. By importing the Excel document directly into Toodledo, I cut out the middleman. The dates don’t always import perfectly into iCal (times get added when I prefer all-day task as the default) but right now it is worth it. Now if someone knows a way I can update my schedule/project plans in Excel and sync it with Toodledo (or any other .csv friendly calendar software) all in real-time, I’d be much obliged. I’ve tried turning my Excel into an RSS feed or URL by uploading it into Google Docs but no go. I may play around with Yahoo Pipes (suggestion from the comments of the original post) but I feel a bit wary about learning new technologies in the summer time crunch before fall classes start.In any case–thanks!
ugg123456789 - August 12, 2010 at 1:49 am
I do tons of peer review and the vast majority of what I read is completely unpublishable, self-indulgent, jargon-laden crap. No one should ever feel guilty for writing an honest review Chapa GTX. If it has to be harsh, so be it.