Google Calendar – Jake Miller

Google Calendar Booking Pages

Google Calendar has had appointment slots for as long as I can remember, but they’ve always been a bit clumsy.

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There were a few problems:

They only worked well from within your own domain. So, if you offered appointments to someone other than your colleagues or students, they weren’t ideal.
The experience of the person scheduling them with you was unclear.
They had to look at them from within a regular calendar view.

Now, Google has offered a solution to those issues. You can now create Google Calendar booking pages that are reminiscent of tools like Calendly and YouCanBookMe. This is super handy for people outside of your domain—like parents scheduling parent/teacher conferences—and they’re much clearer for all parties.

Here are some awesome features:

You can set the slots up to appear during certain blocks of time!
You can set it to automatically remove slots that coincide with existing calendar events, keeping you from getting double booked.
You can also associate a special form with the slots that ask the person to provide you with some information.
Finally, you can also set it to automatically generate Google Meet links… or not!

This is available in all Education accounts – Fundamentals, Standard, Plus, and the Teaching and Learning Upgrade. It’s not available in some non-education accounts though.

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[ Image(s) Source: https://workspaceupdates.googleblog.com/2022/03/blog-post.html ]

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Keyboard Shortcuts in Google Calendar

The new school year started for my colleagues and I a few weeks ago. One process that I have to go through at the beginning of each school year is getting all of the year’s events onto my Google Calendar. This is a tedious process, but it’s an important one for me. The main task here is copying events from our school’s calendar onto my calendar. The school calendar is jam-packed with stuff and I only need a subset of those events.

While going week-by-week through the school year, I thought “There has got to be a quicker way to navigate through this!” Well, I did a little poking around and found my answer! Keyboard Shortcuts!

If you go into Settings, you can turn on Keyboard shortcuts. First, let’s look at how to do this and then I’ll share some of my favorite shortcuts.

So, that animation showed you our first 2 keyboard shortcuts:
– / brings up the search, all ready for you to find that special event you were looking for.
– ? brings up all of the keyboard shortcuts, for when you forget some of them (which you will).

Here are the other ones that I’ve added to my repertoire:

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Calendar Lab in Gmail

I don’t know about you, but I’m often reading and responding to emails that relate to scheduling things. When I am doing that, it’s great to have my calendar handy. Using the Google Calendar Gadget Lab in Gmail makes that possible. I can see my calendar, add events to it and quickly get to the details for certain events. Check it out: