How Calendar Tools Improve Education and Foster Participation best practices

Many educators use calendar tools to keep organized and plan their school days. But what if you could leverage them to enhance educational outcomes for your students? Integrating these tools in the classroom can boost productivity and student participation. Integrative calendar tools can also help build an inclusive learning environment for students.

Let’s first understand how these tools can be helpful in the classroom.

How Calendar Tools Benefit Educators and Students

Educators have a lot to do in a short amount of time, including writing lessons, grading, administrative responsibilities, meetings, and teaching. That means that one of the most critical skills for educators is time management. To be successful in the classroom, you must be able to prioritize your workday goals while managing your personal time to stay healthy.

Other crucial skills you need throughout your day include:

• Effective communication so that students benefit from your lessons;
• Conflict resolution skills to ensure you remain calm when resolving classroom disagreements;
• Decision-making skills to build and revise lesson plans and other critical duties.

Calendar tools and other technology can help you and your students improve time management skills while managing your day. Adding a digital embeddable calendar to your available syllabus encourages student participation throughout the year. You can also organize your schedule by creating a separate calendar overlay for your educator duties and personal commitments. There’s a lot you can do with your calendars!

When you create a complex assignment for them, such as a group project or research paper, calendar training teaches skills like:

• How to set goals and break them down into achievable steps, helping students with both personal and professional goals;
• Understanding how to organize priorities, teaching them to create boundaries around their personal time;
• How to create deadlines and milestones.

Calendar tools and training help students translate academic work into much-needed soft skills for the workplace and gain a better handle on work-life balance while managing their own workload. After all, your students will one day grow up and need to learn how to manage and organize their own calendars, so why not teach them these skills sooner rather than later? 

Using calendar systems as an educator can also help to engage your larger community, including other faculty and staff, as well as your students’ parents and caregivers. 

How Calendar Tools Benefit the Larger Community

School districts play a vital role in keeping students, parents, and the larger community informed, and with subscription and embeddable calendars, this task becomes effortless. By embedding a calendar directly onto the school district’s website, visitors can easily see upcoming events, holidays, and important deadlines at a glance. Plus, with subscription calendars, parents, students, and community members can display events directly on their personal calendars, ensuring they never miss a parent-teacher conference, school board meeting, class schedule of exams and quiz dates, or holiday break. It’s an easy, seamless way to keep everyone on the same page, fostering stronger communication and engagement across the entire school community.

Calendar Strategies to Boost Productivity

Educators and students need tools that help boost productivity. While a digital calendar lets students visualize their day, added functionality can provide functionality to achieve their goals seamlessly and accurately. How can you use online calendar integrations in the classroom?

The first step is to discover what integrations are available for your calendar tool, such as Google, Outlook, or Apple calendars. Google connects to third-party apps like Zoom. Outlook works best with Microsoft apps and Apple with iOS, MacOS, and other Apple integrations. You can also leverage a tool like AddEvent that works well across all calendar platforms for ease of use. 

Some integrations may require you to set a trigger for deployment. For example, you could schedule a Zoom meeting, invite students through email, and add the event to their Google calendar when they accept the invitation. Teach them to set reminders for the event and send event reminders on the day of the meeting. This reciprocal synchronization between the two programs is effective and practical, providing real-world applications students can use in any job.

Another worthwhile calendar integration for use in the classroom is recognizing different time zones. Doing so allows you to plan virtual visits to global classrooms and facilities. You can connect to other technologies, too. For more advanced coursework, you can teach students to integrate calendar tools with specialty software, such as customer relationship management systems or project management software. Doing so gives them hands-on practice with tools they might use one day in the workplace.

Sharing the practical applications of integrative calendar tools with your students is one way to set them up for success in education and the workplace.

Using Calendar Tools to Improve Student Outcomes

Improving student outcomes is not just about workplace skills training. Today’s technology provides educators with tools that promote inclusivity to avoid hosting inaccessible events. Up to one in four Americans have a disability, according to the CDC, some of which may impede their ability to access technology. It’s wise to ensure that all your events and lessons are accessible. How can you accomplish this?

First, understand that accessibility means that all people have access to both content and connectivity. Accessibility goes beyond the student who is physically disabled. Your lessons should accommodate neurodivergent students as well as low-income students who do not have internet access to complete online homework.

You can improve your inclusion efforts by asking those who require accommodations for recommendations. You may need additional material, such as coursework in large print or Braille, assistive communication or listening devices, open or close captioning, etc.

Finally, it’s crucial to set up your classroom to be accessible and participation-friendly. The room should accommodate free movement and have space for wheelchairs. Welcome students who use noise-canceling headphones to participate in group activities. Deaf and hard-of-hearing students should have a sign-language interpreter. Time slots for collaborative work on your electronic calendar bring everyone together and can improve outcomes for all your students.

Educators should employ calendar tools to improve education and foster participation. Using these technologies in the classroom can help build academic and soft skills among your students while enhancing inclusivity for all.