I began keeping my own plan book on iCal years ago (evidenced by the fact that I still call it iCal). For me it gave me the overview, flexibility, and ease-of-navigating that I had been lacking in a plan book. Additionally, it saved everything for me in a way that a printed syllabus did not.

When iCloud came along, I was thrilled with the possibility of sharing the calendar with my students: no more printing of calendars or making .pdfs of them for posting elsewhere. What I did on the calendar showed up on their calendar. My problem with iCloud, though, was that I could not embed the calendar anywhere, i.e. I couldn’t embed the calendar in my ItsLearning (CMS) page.

I’d been resisting GoogleCalendar for years, largely because I’m not a huge fan of the Google interface, but its flexibility and embed-ability has made me take it on for this year. I’m officially moving to GoogleCalendar away from iCloud / iCal. I will still keep some of my personal schedule on iCal but all of my school-based scheduling will be done through GoogleCalendar so that I can embed that calendar in my ItsLearning page.

The relationship between GoogleCalendar and iCal has been written about plenty (both here and on the web) so I will not retread that ground. Suffice it to say that I have my iCal pulling in my GoogleCalendar events so that I can see whatever I schedule in GoogleCalendar in my iCal (and so on my phone, iPad, etc.). For me, that’s the important part, because a lot of times when a student asks about a date, the easiest thing for me to do is to check it on my phone. So as long as iCal can pull in the GoogleCalendar events (which it is / seems to be doing), that is a system that works fine for me.

So I’m off with GoogleCalendar. It looks great on the ItsLearning page (see the next post for some tips on embedding), and I’m not hating the interface, though I still prefer the Mac / Calendar interface. We’ll see how it goes.