Both students and faculty have access to their own Google calendars. By creating an advising calendar using a Google calendar, when students sign up for an appointment, it will automatically post on their personal calendars. Additionally, you can link the calendar within your Blackboard site for easy access. Let me show you how.
Here is a video of the entire process.
Creating Your Advising Calendar
These instructions are for the Google education site for SUNY Jamestown Community College. All SUNY JCC community members have access to the SUNY JCC Google site. With the educational version of Google, it is possible to create an appointment-type calendar. Here are the steps:
- Log into Google Gmail via MyJCC. You will be selecting the Email link. Note: If you have multiple Google accounts, I would recommend using an incognito window on Google Chrome.
- Select Calendar from the Google Apps. It is in the upper right corner next to your name.
- Create a new calendar by selecting the drop-down menu to the right of the My calendars link. The link will be called Create new calendar.
- Enter a title such as “Advising Calendar – Your name”, enter a description, click the share with others checkbox, check share this calendar with everyone in the organization Jamestown Community College, and change the drop-down to “See only free/busy (hide details)”.
- Click on Create Calendar button.
Adding Appointments to Your Calendar
- Open your Google calendar. Ensure there is a color box next to your advising calendar. Recommend turning off all other calendars unless you need to see where you have conflicts. You can do this by selecting the drop-down button to the right of your calendar link and choosing Display only this calendar.
- Recommend to change to Week view.
- On the calendar, select the time slot you wish to create as an appointment time slot.
- Click the Appointment Slots link. You may have to click on the Getting started with appointment slots link.
- Provide a name for the What field, e.g. Advising.
- Change calendar to your “Advising calendar”.
- Either, select the Offer as a single appointment slot or Offer as slots of XX minutes.
- Select the Create slots button.
Adding Your Advising Calendar to Blackboard
- Begin by opening your Google calendar.
- Click on one of your advising appointment time slots.
- Click on Edit details link.
- Copy link for calendar’s appointment page.
- Open Blackboard and navigate to the point in your course where you want to add the appointment calendar link. Add the link as you would other links for Blackboard.
Note: you could also send this link in an email. - Here is the final result once the link is clicked on.
Well, those are the instructions for adding a calendar to your Blackboard course. If you need assistance, please contact the TEI team.
Additional Resources
- Google Calendar – Create an appointment calendar (PDF)
- Scheduling Advising or Office Hours
- How to keep your Outlook and Google Calendars in Sync
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