Using Google Calendar to Distribute Student Assignments

All teachers know that communication between students, teachers, and parents is invaluable.  With Google Calendars you can easily keep everyone informed about what's going on in your class as well as have a simple way to distribute documents.

Google Calendars can be made public and then embedded (see below) or linked to (click here for example).  With the "Add an Attachment" feature in Google Calendar events teachers can easily share assignments with students.  For an example of how this works click on the March 5, 2013 entry entitled Webquest. Simply click on the entry and then "more details" you will see the document entitled "executive branch webquest.doc"  clicking on that link will download the document.

Particularly in the K-6 environment there may be no need for using a full featured learning management system such as Moodle, and often school websites are cumbersome for uploading documents. Google calendars provide a simple, free alternative for teachers who just want to allow students to get copies of missed or lost assignments.

To use a calendar as a communication and document distribution system follow these steps:

1. Create a new calendar, then need to set the calendar view to Public under the system settings.
2. Under calendar settings/labs make sure to enable the add attachments lab 
3. Create a new event like you normally would, then click on the add attachments link. (Make sure to set the permissions of the document in your Google Drive so that those who you want to access will be able to do so)