I don’t know about you, but I have always thought that the “Daily-Assignment-List-of Words-Page” was always the lamest page on my classroom website. YES it was functional. YES it gave the students the assignments listed by date in a straight column. YES it was just a bunch of TEXT! UGLY!

Well, thanks to those friendly folks over at google, who (in my opinion) has done more to further the frontier of web 2.0, (specifically cloud computing and communication… oh, and not to mention that little business of search they have too) I can now create a dynamic calendar for my classes and embed it right into my website. See my new Calendar Class Page Here.

All you need to have is a Google Calendar (free with your FREE Google account, email, etc.). So if you don’t have a Google account, stop reading this and go get one! That’s OK, I’ll wait.

After you have your google account, then get your free Google Calendar (GCal).

Then, to embed your GCal into your website/blog, go into the “Settings”  and click on “Calendars”. Select the name of your calendar, then highlight the embed code under “Embed This Calendar”. Once you have the embed code on the clipboard, then you paste it onto a new page you create on your website.

**At this step, make sure you are making changes on the webpage using html code instead of the WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) mode. What makes Wordpress - and others- so useful as a classroom website is because of that WYSIWYG visual editor.

When you open your new page, you will see the calendar exactly as it is when you are looking at your Google calendar (g cal) on your Google account. There are a variety of options for your calendar when setting it up, however there is one setting you must have to enable everyone to see your calendar. (Everyone includes your students by the way) You must make the calendar PUBLIC. To do this, Choose: Settings - Calendars - “Calendar Name” - Share This Calendar… and check the box that says “Make this calendar public”.

Then, open your Google calendar to make changes on your website calendar.

If you looked at my calendar (and I KNOW you have) you will see I have two tabs that I add to: “In Class” and “Homework” The “In Class” replaced the “Lesson Plans” page on my site and explains what happens on a daily basis in my class; and the “Homework” is, well, homework. When a student is absent they can see what we did in class and see what the homework is.

Valuable… Functional… Beautiful…and after just a little bit of startup effort, very easy to maintain.

Now, no more ugly text.