Sharing Google Calendar

We've all been there. We all know what's it's like to try to schedule meetings, events, and projects. Now it can be done in a more efficient manner.  By sharing your Google Calendar with your students, colleagues, and parents scheduling just became a breeze. (Well, maybe that''s exaggerating a bit ;) ) but it can make life a whole lot easier. 

Google Calendar is not just for personal use. You can create a variety of calendars to share with different groups of people. Here are some examples of group calendars that could be used at your school:

• Class calendar for class-related events such as activities, class meeting times, testing schedules and lesson objectives
• Homework calendar with detailed descriptions of homework assignments, links to relevant materials and due dates
• School-wide holiday or academic schedule with in-service days, holidays and other scheduling anomalies
• Group project deadlines and milestones for a group or team to track workload
• School sporting event schedules that can be shared with the entire school

Calendar sharing options in Google Apps:

If you use your personal email address with Google Calendar, you have the option to keep a calendar private or to share it. However, with Calendar for Google Apps you have a third sharing option. You can choose to keep a calendar private, to share it with the world, or to only share it with members of your domain. If you share it with members of your domain, the calendar can only be accessed with those who have an “@your_school.edu’ account.

With the sharing options available, it is easy to create a school calendar with varying levels of access – you can specify certain users that can make changes, others that can only see the calendar, or set a broad access setting for the public or individuals at your school.

The following are the different types of access levels you can grant to individuals, users at your school and the public (everyone in the world). 

1. Completely private calendar
   You can set your calendar to be completely private so that none of your calendar information, not even free/busy information, will be available to anyone except those people you specifically add to share your calendar.
   You can use this setting for the entire world (Do not share with everyone) and/or for your school Apps domain (Do not share with everyone in my domain).
2. Limited calendar view: free/busy information
   Sometimes you want people to be able to check your schedule and see only the times you're busy. In the free/busy view, someone will only see blocks of time marked as busy for times when you have entries in your calendar. They will not be able to see the name of the event or any of the event details.
   This view can be useful to share as an appointment availability calendar that you could share with students or parents. This way the students or parents could see when you are available without knowing any of the details of your schedule.
3. Full calendar view: show all event details
   With this setting, other users can see your calendar and events and invite you to events, but cannot see events on your calendar that have been marked as private.
   This is a common view for school-related calendars that are shared with users at your school domain. For that calendar, your colleagues or students would be able to see the events and details, but you could also add private events such as conferences or sensitive meetings that cannot be viewed by colleagues or students at your school.
4. Full calendar access: make changes to events
   This setting is for sharing with individuals only. You can add specific people to a calendar who have access to see and change all events, including private ones.
   This can be useful for team calendars as it grants multiple people the ability to add and edit events on a single calendar. For example, a team project calendar could function better if each of the team members could check availability and add meetings instead of just one person. It would also allow the team members to edit the events, allowing each person to add to event descriptions, like an agenda.
   Please note: You cannot grant someone outside your domain this level of access to your primary calendar (this is the calendar created by default with your Google Apps account). However, any secondary calendars can be shared, such as a calendar created specifically for homework, school projects, school sporting events, etc.
5. Full calendar ownership: Make changes to events AND manage sharing
   The final privilege you can grant is the ability to manage sharing access for a calendar. This setting also is for sharing with individuals only. With this setting, an individual would essentially become an owner of the calendar, as they would be able to add, remove and edit events as well as add, remove and edit the sharing settings of the calendar.
   This is a setting to be treated with care. For example, someone with this permission setting would be able to change the sharing-access level of individuals or change if the calendar is viewable to the domain or public.
   Please note: You cannot grant someone outside your domain this level of access to your primary calendar

An InLinkz Link-up