District and School Events Calendars via Google Apps?

I'm investigating Google Apps for Schools and wondering if anyone is using this for the events calendars for their schools and district.

I would like for each school to have their own events calendar managed by someone at that school via their Google account or a dedicated "calendar" account. That calendar can then be embedded in the school's website for public consumption.

Then I'd like a district calendar that included events rolled up from each school as well as the ability to add district events. That district calendar would be shared via the district website for the public.

If anyone has done that, how did you structure it?

Did you use dedicated calendar accounts or did staff use their google apps account and were given permissions to edit the shared calendar?

Can events "roll up" from school calendars to the district calendar or do events need to be copied over from one calendar to another?

Can events be labeled on the district calendar via color code or some other method to easily distinguish between the different schools or does there need to be a manual solution like putting initials in the title of every event?

Thanks for your help. It looks like Google Apps has promise. Setting up a calendar would be a good way to get started.

Tags: calendar, google apps

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Permalink Reply by Allison Hart on October 5, 2009 at 10:32am

we do this... we're a K-12 private school - so we've basically got 3 "school" calendars: Elementary, Middle School, High School. each is shared with "anyone in our domain" (each family has an account for access)not the whole world.

our building admin assistants manage each school's calendar from their own account. the only reason to create a separate "calendar" account is to prevent that person's name form being attached to the event. (any event I post says "created by Allison" , so maybe you'd want just "Middle School" or msweb or whatever. )

here is how to embed multiple calendars in a google site (which we use for all our community sites)
First, subscribe to all the various calendars involved here (i assume you are site admin?)
Then, read this Google Help article:

Cool thing about this is that the +GoogleCalendar button will still work in the gadget allowing people to "subscribe" to the various calendars (they can choose which ones)

Here is a screenshot from our MS Faculty site which has 3 calendars combined

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Permalink Reply by Kevin Johnson on October 5, 2009 at 12:25pm

Thanks, Allison. So if I understand, you don't create a single "rolled up" district calendar and then embed that calendar. Instead, the embedded calendar combines other calendars "on the fly" so to speak.

How are the different calendars identified on the combined calendars aside from being different colors? Is there a legend that appears with the embedded calendar?

Thanks again for your help!

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Permalink Reply by Eric Snyder on October 6, 2009 at 2:47pm

For several years now, we've been working on a Multicultural / Diversity Calendar. Many educators and administrators around the world have for years been using the calendar as a source for Religious, National, Cultural, etc. events, for both organizational diversity programs, and for classroom intelligence. There are about 550 different events on the calendar.

This started as a paper calendar, but two or three years ago, we created an electronic version of the calendar for intranets. I've been experimenting with exporting the events to a Google calendar. The events are all recorded as "all day" events. Would you be interested in previewing the calendar to see if this is something that might be of interest in your school group as an information source to be "rolled up" with your internal calendar?