Roseway Heights School

Introduction

The Roseway Heights School web site now uses Google Calendar to display events of interest. Google Calendar allows us to manage multiple color-coded topics within one calendar view.

If you just want to view the calendar, read no further! You can just go to the Calendar page. This page is to help people who maintain the calendars.

Concepts

Where does the calendar live?

Google Calendar is hosted at Google (i.e. google.com), not directly on the rosewayheights web site. The calendar is embedded in rosewayheights.org so that people can view it there without having to go to Google or login to Google. Only those who maintain the calendar (e.g. add, edit, delete events) need to login to Google. You do not need to install special software for Google Calendar; you just access it through your web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox).

Google User

In order to maintain the calendar, you need to have a Google user account. If you have a “gmail” email account, you are already a Google user. Otherwise, you will need to create a google user account for yourself. See below for details.

Google Calendar

A Google user can have several Google calendars. We have a special Google user called “rwhcalendar” which owns the calendars that you see on the rosewayheights web site. While this rwhcalendar user “owns” the calendars, real people maintain them through their Google user accounts. We configure the calendars to allow this shared maintanance.

Event

An event is an individual calendar entry with the following properties:

• Title (labeled “What”, mandatory)
• Schedule (labeled “When”), which includes:
  • Date (mandatory)
  • Start and end time or “All day” (mandatory)
  • End date (usually the same as the initial date)
  • Repeats (optional, see Tasks section below for details)
• Location (labeled “Where”, optional, see Tasks below)
• Description (optional)

An event has other properties that are relevant for organizing meetings and managing a personal calendar, but those aren’t relevant for the rosewayheights calendar.

Embedded Calendar on Web Site

We have “embedded” the rwhcalendar user’s calendars into the rosewayheights web site so that people browsing the web site can:

• Click on an event for detail
• Page forward and back in time
• Select a Week, Month, or Agenda view
• Print the current view
• Copy an event to their own Google calendar
• Select a subset of color-coded calendars to display. For instance, if someone only wants to display after-school information, they can select it and not the general calendar.
• Download an iCal file with the calendar contents

The calendars are color coded as follows:

• Roseway Heights General Calendar – Green
• Roseway Heights After-School Calendar – Blue

We may add other calendars in the future.

Tasks

Creating a Google User

1. Go to calendar.google.com
2. click “Create an account”
3. Fill in the info and click, “I accept. Create my account.”
4. Send rwhadmin at palmerhansen dot com (Chris Hansen) the email address that you used for the account. Tell Chris which calendar you will maintain.
5. Chris will authorize you to manage events for the calendar.
6. You will receive an email. Follow the calendar link.
7. Select, “Yes, add this calendar.”
8. If you already have a Google or Gmail account, and you provided that to Chris, you may need to go through a one-time step to register with Google Calendar.

Logging In to Google Calendar

1. Go to calendar.google.com
2. On the right side, enter your email address or Google user name and password and click Sign In.
3. You will see a consolidated view of all the calendars for which you have access. This may include your own personal Google Calendar as well as other shared calendars. Even though you have shared calendars, you personal Google calendar is not available to others unless you grant them access.

Adding an Event

1. Mouse over the start time on the calendar.
2. Click and drag from the start time to end time and release the mouse button.
3. Click “edit event details”
4. Enter the title into the “What” field.
5. If needed, select the Repeats option. Note: The repeats option is a convenient way to provide the same information over a series, but people viewing the event on rosewayheights will not have any indication that the event they see is part of a repeating series. We suggest that you describe the repeating schedule in the Description.
6. Avoid the Where field. Note: Google interprets the Where field as an address and tries to associate a map with it. So entering “MPR” provides the user with a map that tries to find “MPR” in Kansas.
7. Enter as much detail as possible into the Description field. We suggest the format below.
8. Click Save.

Some events are all-day, for instance in-service days. In that case, click Create Event and click “Add day” instead of the first three steps above.

Suggested Description Format

Given the notes above. we suggest the following format for the description:

Location: (room number or area outside the school)
Schedule: (optional, if this is a repeating event, describe the pattern)

(the rest of the description)

Note: Do not include HTML tags in the description. This can break the rendering of Google calendar, making it tricky to delete and replace the event.

Editing an Event

1. Click on the title of the event
2. Edit the fields as desired
3. Click Save

Note: Google Calendar allows you to change the start and end date of an event by dragging the top or bottom of the event box. This take effect immediately, so please use the feature carefully or avoid it altogether. As long as you make no other change immediately afterwards, you can go to the orange box above the calendar and click Undo.

Deleting an Event

1. Click on the title of the event
2. Click Delete
3. If you didn’t mean to delete, go to the orange box above the calendar and click Undo.

More Information

For more information about using Google Calendar, see the Google Calendar Help site.