What do you use for managing and creating your school calendars?

[kennysarmy]

We have someone here who uses an old bit of software that only runs with Office 2010 present, I'd like them to move to something that's a bit more current for calendar creation and management.

 

What options are out there?

[JATSO]

We have a school diary in GAFE which certain members staff can edit others are read only.

[DGardiner]

We have a school diary in GAFE which certain members staff can edit others are read only.

 

this and i use GAM to add them to every users calendar lists and set active

[fiza]

We have a school diary in GAFE which certain members staff can edit others are read only.

 

same here

[MartinT]

We use SOCS, which feeds our website, Firefly and Outlook.

[kennysarmy]

How do all the above help create different printed calendars for say, Staff, Parents, Students etc

[MartinT]

The person who does calendar printing uses the SOCS filtering to create an output file to send to the printing company.

 

Meant to add: we have flags for Staff, Students, Parents etc. so filtering the output (or iCals feeds) is easy.

[fiza]

How do all the above help create different printed calendars for say, Staff, Parents, Students etc

 

Why do you give Staff, Parents & Students printed calendars?

[MartinT]

Don't even go there......!

 

Because our parents are old fashioned and kicked up a storm when we stopped printing them.

[kennysarmy]

Why do you give Staff, Parents & Students printed calendars?

 

Valid point...and obviously not my decision - but I'm happy to poke the bees nest and ask why

[AlanD]

Dsyou MIS not include calendar features...so that events which affect timetabling rooiming and staffing are not integrated?

[MartinT]

We use Room Booking System to integrate with timetabling from SIMS, but otherwise keep the two systems separate as they serve different functions.

[kennysarmy]

Valid point...and obviously not my decision - but I'm happy to poke the bees nest and ask why

 

Classic reasons for having a printed calendar:

 

• Power cuts?
  
• Paper copies more accessible?
  
• You can see a lot more at a glance - without risking your health (continually) looking at a screen.
  
• Paper versions cannot be edited easily
  

 

 

 

Don't you just love it!

[elsiegee40]

I am having a little skirmish about electronic calendars for governors at the moment. I need to be able to just see when meetings are happening as I have a cross MAT role. I don’t want to be going to an excel spreadsheet and painstakingly transferring each to my Google Calendar.

 

The techs are very resistant - latest excuse for not using O365 is the the kids couldn’t work if they lost the internet connection.

 

They’re not trying that one on me. The kids don’t need to go anywhere near O365 if they don’t want to.

 

Fortunately, so many of the governors and Trustees across the MAT rely on their diaries being on their phones this is one that has a huge amount of support and we will succeed in the end.

[DSapseid]

about 4 years ago i created a spreadsheet where the days events are entered onto a list for that day (max of 3) then this pulls it through to a month to view and also a week to double page spread. These are printed and distributed as part of our staff handbook updates which staff then put into there staff handbook ringbinder.

 

We asked staff if they actually used the week to view part and they do quite alot! Some of them list the lessons of the day and what they will teach that lesson in.

 

From this it creates a master list that than can be imported into our website and outlook if need be.

 

Its not the tidiest of solutions but it works for us, i just have to edit it every year to set it up for the next school year. Myself, the Head & Office manager work together in finalizing the calendar prior to the summer holidays and distribute a pdf copy to all staff. We also send a sample one out for staff to look at around at start of May for them to check over any trips/exams they run.

[Sonic007]

We use a shared google calendar.