Managing calendars

[racole]

Our K-12 is rolling out K-12 with teacher materials through curriculum communities that users can join based on what they teach.  In addition, they will have "student courses" generated as well as a school community.  We understand the Canvas calendar is an instructional calendar b/c primarily tied to assignments.  Here are a few things am interested in hearing how folks are approaching:

1. Because there is not a Global calendar, how are you displaying system-wide events?
2. Within a school community differentiating how to display items for faculty versus what parents would see (schools now have Google calendars on their public webpages)
3. Are there any good apps that consolidate many of the calendar feeds (e.g., Canvas and Google) into one view?

[BradMoser]

So you set up user communities inside of your instances of Canvas or you are having them join communities through this new Jive feature?

[racole]

Brad,

We have created courses in Canvas that are used as communities.  Teachers are enrolling through Canvas Catalog function.  We have all curriculum communities "open" so that teachers can see prior course or previous grade level.  We are also having the communities track important PL events and resources.

Bob

[BradMoser]

I will have to check out the Canvas Catalogue function. I have never used it before. So they self enroll then into those communities and it sounds like those communities are courses that contain content. Do they then import content from the community to their course?

[racole]

Brad- yes, they self-enroll.  The courses have teacher content (not student materials yet) and discussions and events around the curriculum.  We don't envision the teacher copying in the teacher materials to the student courses but as creating "student facing" plan to publish to Commons to allow teachers to search and import.

Bob

[clong]

Hi Robert,

I would stick with Google Calendars for this purpose. They are much more robust and flexible and you could embed a Google Calendar which has several different individual calendar feeds on it into the homepages of all your community Canvas Courses and choose which feeds would be displayed based on the community.

Here's a good blog post on how to do this

Displaying Multiple Google Calendars on Your Website « TJ Houston.com

[racole]

Thanks Chris- interesting that when I "turn off" a calendar view in Canvas that the feed still shows all calendars in the Google shared calendar view.  I don't know if it would be better to have separate Canvas feeds for each course but if you had several enrollments it is either see all or see none.

Bob

[clong]

One way to get around this is to use the calendar feed for the Test Student in the Course. So go to the Student View and then go to calendar to get that.

[racole]

Thanks Chris- will give that a try.  BTW- how did you become a Canvas Champion?

Bob

[clong]

Champion should be Coach. Checkout Canvas Coach​

[racole]

Chris- found that when I try to add the individual course calendar feed using Test Student, it doesn't display on Google Calendar.  Not sure if this is a bug or not b/c I also added myself to another Canvas course and added calendar events.  They do not display on the my Google Canvas calendar (which is the global feed).  The new events are included when I open the feed link (.ics) and view in Calendar app but not in Google (even after refeshing Google Calendar).

Will keep testing these options.

[clong]

The Google calendars feeding from Canvas can take a very long time to update. I'm not sure I would add any feeds from Canvas into your Google Calendar. I would use the Google Calendar as a way to bring in School Calendars, and Global info. This is one area Canvas could make some improvements towards.

There are some good ideas about this open for voting soon now and in June. See: