Externally Accessing Teacher Schedules

Jess Moxsky
Jess Moxsky
Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant
in Blackbaud Learning Management System™

Hello K12 community! Here's the sitch - I have a teacher who needs to be able to coordinate regular meetings with various teachers on campus. We have their academic schedules in the system, and our faculty know how to subsribe to the webcal feed for any of their calendars. Unfortunately, we have a very low adoption rate for Outlook calendars and no real timeline for improving that (not my circus lol). What would be ideal would be our teachers subscribing to their class schedules from the system and then the one who needs to schedule meetings could use Outlook's Scheduling Assistant to find the times that those particular teachers are available. Barring a unilateral decision about using Outlook (I can dream!), the best solution I've found is to point the teacher who needs to schedule meetings to the Free/Busy reports by teacher and meeting time and our manually-created scheduling guides.

What is happening now is that the teacher is manually subscribing to the webcal feed for every teacher's individual schedule, which is very quickly maxing out the number of available Outlook event subscriptions, meaning that not all events are even populating to the subscribed calendar. This is a known Outlook issue/feature so it's not the end of the world.

My question is this:

Have any of you found a more elegant workaround for this? Using Find Me Now for individual teachers is okay but not much faster than using reports. I'd love to be able to create a calendar in the system that is only visible to him with teacher schedules, but even if I was able to create ical event categories for each teacher's feed, those events would not be pushed out to that calendar subscription because the events would technically be external despite coming from the system.

Sorry this was so long-winded! Congratulations if you made it this far :)

Comments

  • Lisa Sturgis
    Lisa Sturgis
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 1 Participant Facilitator 1

    We setup a faculty directory and our admin/teachers can view each teacher's schedule that way via their contact card. We like that option as it allows them to navigate to the specific date they want to meet with a teacher and see their free time on that day (our schedule rotates).

  • Jess Moxsky
    Jess Moxsky
    Kudos 5 Fourth Anniversary Name Dropper Participant

    This is fantastic for meetings with a single teacher - our faculty member in question needs to be able to meet with multiple teachers at once, often not the same group each time. I think we are proceeding with the longer work-around of viewing individual schedules and checking with the free teachers by block report. Hopefully I can push school-wide Outlook Calendar adoption some day :) Thank you, Lisa!

  • Rick Geyer
    Rick Geyer
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Participant

    Just so you know, when a teachers subscribes to the webcal feed for their schedule, it does not block them out as busy. Just wanted to let you know that even if you had perfect adoption of this, it would not give you exactly what you are looking for. In order for them to show as “busy,” teachers would have to import the calendar. The downside to this is that the import is a snapshot in time, so it will not update if changes are made.

    We recommend that our teachers enter their teaching schedule into their Google Calendars (we use Google instead of Outlook). Using recurring appointments, it doesn't really take very long for them to put their teaching schedule in for the year.

    Another workaround could be to export the entire teacher schedule from Blackbaud into an Excel doc that you could issue to this teacher that needs to schedule appointments. Now, they would have to know which block/period was happening at a given meeting time, but as long as they knew that, they could cross reference several teachers at once to verify that they are available. I export our schedule through an advanced list for setting my room intercom paging groups, but also use this sheet similarly to find teachers with open blocks and such.

  • Joshua Blice
    Joshua Blice
    Ninth Anniversary Kudos 1 Name Dropper Participant

    Our workaround is to ask teachers to subscribe to their Blackbaud calendar and then I have a video that shows them how to copy it over to their school outlook calendar. This way everyone can see if they have something on their calendar for those class periods. We do not have full adoption on this but more and more people are realizing the importance of having this information on their calendar.

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