For the course calendar, I have decided just to use one calendar for all three courses. I thought about making separate calendars for each course, but I think the main utility of a public calendar is for students and colleagues to quickly figure out a convenient time to schedule an appointment. In others words, the purpose is to help me avoid playing e-mail tag. As such, a unified calendar makes the most sense.

After spending time looking over different templates, I decided it was faster just to go with something off the shelf. I wanted to be able to continuously update the calendar as events pop-up. I chose Google because its features seemed the most intuitive. MS Office also has a publishable on-line calendar, but it was not as easy to integrate within my site.

Google makes it relatively easy to both manage a public calendar and to embed the calendar with in a website.

I would ideally like to make it possible for students to sign-up for appointments through the on-line calendar, but this is a technical task that I can postpone for now.

I know that the most common concern about a public calendar is privacy. It's pretty easy to keep appointments and engagements private so that they only appear as "busy" times on the calendar.

One final note, it seems like Google Calendar is already pretty popular here at HWS as it is easy to add HWS events and the HWS academic/events calendar. The calendars are easy to find just by searching "HWS" in the public calendars function.

Labels: web technology