Tech Tip: Use Time-Blocking – Please!
This might be a personal request of all faculty I have the pleasure of working with. With all of us working from home a lot more and possibly only being on campus two days a week, it’s challenging trying to find time to meet with people. It’s so nice when I can just pull up a calendar invite, add the people I want to meet with, and choose “Find a Time,” and it magically presents everyone’s calendar revealing all the common free time. This, people, is how most organizations work. However, we don’t even come close. Most of the time there is nothing listed on faculty calendars. Oh, so you’re free on Wednesday at 2 pm? That’s perfect. Well, that’s usually not the case.
My tiny tech tip is to leverage your digital calendar tools to implement time-blocking strategies. In addition to simply listing your class, office hours, and meeting times, allocate specific blocks of time for different tasks, such as grading, research, and class preparation. This helps in creating a structured schedule and enhances focus on specific activities during dedicated time slots. It also allows for better visualization of your day and ensures that important tasks are given the attention they deserve. But most importantly to me, your colleague, is now I know when I can request a meeting with you. If you’re still available for meeting requests but you’ve blocked off time to grade, you can indicate that you are still free on the calendar event. It’s quite simple. So what do say? Can we please use our calendars?
Update your Calendar & ToDo Lists via Twitter
My first post about Twitter, Little Known Facts about Twitter in the Classroom, talked about some easy uses for Twitter in the classroom. I said, Twitter is connected to everything. I can update my Google calendar and ToDo tasks via Twitter, and I can set it up so Twitter will broadcast my blog posts from my blog to Twitter with a link sending people back to my blog to read the post. Think announcements for students with that one. It’s also connected with a very nice polling site, Poll Everywhere, that lets your respondents vote in your polls via Twitter. Twitter makes their API available so any company can develop tools that will work through Twitter.
This post follows up that and talks about the calendar and ToDo updates via Twitter. If you’re busy, like most people are, you might find that your calendar and a ToDo list are very helpful in keeping you going. I rely heavily on both in my everyday life. Usually when I’m out and about, and I need to either add an event or meeting to my calendar, I find it a hassle to pull up my calendar program and add it. Same thing with my ToDo lists. But I’ve found that sending a text message directly to Twitter can do that for me. All I have to do is text a direct message to my Google Calendar or Remember the Milk ToDo service and it automatically posts to my calendar or list. Click the links for more information about each.
I use this when I schedule conferences with students. I grab my phone and send a text message to 40404 with “d gcal Meeting with ‘Student’ Tuesday at 11am.” The d is for direct message, which is private on Twitter, and gcal is the Google Calendar Twitter name. The rest is the event I want added to the calendar. When I get to a computer, all the appointments are there in my calendar. And since I sync my Google calendar with my Blackberry, they show up on my phone calendar too within minutes. The screencast below shows you how this all works.
Part II of III tips for using Twitter in the classroom. Part I covers using Twitter via text messaging on your cell phone, Part II update calendar/ToDo list via Twitter. The last tip will show you how to use Twitter with a polling service PollEverywhere.
