Maintaining course calendars with free online tools
I’m trying to encourage faculty to maintain an electronic course calendar outside of Blackboard so that students can consume them however they choose (iCal subscription, RSS, web, etc.). Today I gave my first calendaring workshop and it went pretty well. I planned on showing both 30 Boxes and Google Calendar, but after showing 30 Boxes we decided not to look at Google Calendar. I think Google has a few more features, but for ease of entering events and tagging them, 30 Boxes wins hands down. Google requires you to create a separate calendar for each aspect of your life, whereas 30 Boxes lets you tag events as you enter them. When you want to share out only particular events, you just pick the tag(s) you want to share and then you’re presented with all sorts of options for sharing, from web badges to simple lists.
Course calendars are important because they fit in with at least one of the seven principles for good practice in undergraduate education, emphasizing time on task. You can grab the handout here.
