Teachers are some of the most dedicated professionals that are out there. They are always available for students who need help. They are the ones who direct us when we at loss, they are also the ones who guide us in deciding our future careers.
Teaching is a career full of love, happiness, enthusiasm and even fun! To make your teaching more organised, we have hand picked the best calendar tools that will work for you.
Explain Everything
Explain Everything is sort of like an infinite virtual whiteboard for your online classroom.
Specifically marketed as a tool for remote teams and online learning, Explain Everything gives you a blank canvas to work with and lets you do everything from write on it to drop in animations to explain your latest lesson.
You can switch from one-on-one to group collaboration, depending on the context. Record videos of your lessons for students who learn better visually, and let them record their own to send back. Explain Everything also lets you create feedback loops for the class to respond to every so often so students don’t get distracted.
Good for: Educators who want a more interactive approach
Price: Limited free plan, $3/user/month for Educators, $0.90/user/month for Educator Groups (starts at ten users)
Availability: iOS and Android
Short Calendar
This is basically a web tool that allows users to create calendars for a set number of days and email them to their inbox. It is combines the services of a to-do-list with calendar generating thus a simple use-case. It might not be the ideal tool for organizing a month worth of tasks but it is absolutely perfect for a short term planning.
Slack
Slack made a name for itself as a reliable workplace messenger long before COVID hit, and it lends itself well to today’s digital classroom.
Users can create Slack channels for different classes where your students can discuss their projects, assignments and topics. Features like polling are useful for quickly getting an opinion from your students.
You can block out virtual office hours for yourself, establishing a set time for students to reach you. Hold voice or video calls with your class and easily send and receive files. Slack can also integrate with other apps like Google Drive to provide expanded sharing capabilities.
Good for: Educators who need to set up dedicated communication channels
Price: Free
Availability: iOS and Android
Calendrica
Calendrica is web tool that lets users create personal calendars online and for free. It offers various ready made templates to which you can add images, text and customize month and year. The images can be uploaded from both your computer and the web.
Calendly
Primarily a scheduling tool, Calendly can help teachers keep track of multiple calendars at once. You can use it as a shared calendar app for iPhone and Android since it works with both Google and Apple calendar apps. That can be especially helpful if you teach classes at multiple institutions or teach multiple subjects.
Parent teacher communication doesn’t have to come at a premium. Calendly lets you choose your own time slot according to your availability, so you can program in a time frame for Q and A sessions with students, one-on-one discussions about a semester project or remote meetings with parents. Since you set your availability beforehand, you never double-book.
Students can also use Calendly to set up and participate in career advising appointments. Universities that won’t be opening for the Fall semester can take their candidate interviews online, connecting with applicants wherever they are.
Good for: Educators bogged down with scheduling admin tasks
Price: Free for Basic membership, $8/user/month for Premium, $12/user/month for Pro
Availability: iOS and Android
Compact Calendar Creator
This utility allows users to instantly create compact calendars online and save them in PDF format. You can specify the start and end dates and mark the holiday dates for any country based on your Google Calendar account.
Jotlet
Jotlet is another great calendar creation tool. It allows users to create their own online calendars to mark tasks, events, and notes. These calendars ce be printed out, imported, exported, and you can also obtain a URL for your calendar to share it with other.
Animoto
If you want to take classroom presentations a little further than a static slideshow, Animoto lets you easily make interesting video-based presentations.
You can choose from pre-made templates that let you drag and drop images, videos or both. Animoto also has a licensed music library and a library of stock images to choose from if you’re running low on multimedia content.
Use Animoto to make video content for YouTube, Instagram or Facebook. Cloud-based storage lets you access and edit your videos from a laptop or mobile device. Marketed as a tool for making engaging Instagram stories, you can use it in your own way to make unique videos with the tools you have available.
Good for: Educators who want to use multimedia social content in the classroom
Price: Free (Animoto watermark on videos), $33/month for Professional and $49/month for Team
Availability: iOS and Android
DayViewer
This is a free web service that lets you manage your events in auser friendly interface. You can add events, tasks, notes, payments and organize them in the whatever way you want.
iDoneThis
This a smart mini-assistant tool that reminds its users to log what they did each day. It is email based and keeps asking you what you did every day. It then records your answer in a month-view calendar so you can easily check your progress.
Google Drive
Most of us are already familiar with this one. Google Drive helps everyone from business people to teachers and students store and transfer their important files. Drive’s cloud-based system lets users work on written documents, spreadsheets and more from any internet-connected device.
The collaborative nature of Google Docs lets students submit their work entirely online, where their instructor can edit and leave notes in the document as needed. You can upload supplementary images, create spreadsheets or put a Powerpoint-style set of lecture notes together in Google Slides.
If students need to download a file to use in their work — such as a video file for a multimedia editing course — just store it in Drive in a shared folder your students can access. It’s that simple.
You can also schedule video lectures as Google Calendar events, so everyone gets a reminder. Add important due dates and the course syllabus to a group folder so the class has everything they need for tests and homework assignments.
Good for: Educators that need a solid file creation and sharing solution
Cost: Free
Availability: iOS and Android
Weekis
This is a free online weekly planner that allows users to : drag events from one day to another and organize them in an easy to use intuitive interface. It also automatically puts events in the right place based on day/dates.
Coolendar
This is a free and simple online calendar that lets its users manage an online calendar. You can add lists of events and tag and filter them them too.
Remind
An app created specifically for students and parents, Remind sends out — you guessed it — timely reminders for big projects and events.
Teachers can use Remind to send out big class announcements, make sure everyone’s on track to submit their projects or remind their class when the next test will be. It even has a group chat feature you can use to reach out to students individually if you notice them having trouble, or if they just have questions.
Another useful feature: you can track stats and read receipts to see who got the message you sent out. Remind’s dashboard shows you how many people got your message, how many read it and whether there were any errors.
Good for: Educators with lots of deadlines
Price: Free
Availability: iOS and Android
Additio
Additio takes classroom and team management digital. Use this app to take notes on participation and attendance, calculate grades and keep track of student performance.
The app has a lesson planning feature to map out the semester or quarter and rubrics you can use for assessments. Additio also integrates with Google and Microsoft’s classroom features for easy importing of grades.
Like most of the other apps on this list, Additio has a messaging feature you can use to stay in touch with both students and parents. The app’s developers make a point of stating that Additio is compliant with FERPA and GDPR privacy rules, and that they do their best to keep sensitive information secure.
Good for: Educators that want to digitize their classroom management system
Price: Free with paid in-app upgrades available
Availability: iOS
Haiku Deck
Haiku Deck lets users make beautiful presentations easily. The app’s streamlined interface gets rid of the clutter surrounding your average slideshow presentation, creating a more professional look.
Haiku Deck gives you an assortment of creative commons images and pre-built templates to choose from so you can put together your next lecture in a snap. Presentations are optimized across platforms and work on a smartphone, tablet or laptop.
Students can use the app as well, so they can create something more interesting for their next project than slides full of text blocks.
Good for: Educators that want to spice up their presentations
Price: Free to try, $9.99/month billed annually or $19.99 billed monthly for Pro, $29.99/month for Premium
Availability: iOS
The TED App
TED’s motto is “ideas worth spreading,” and chances are you’ll find plenty of knowledge to share with your students on their app. From politics to philosophy, TED has cataloged thousands of hours of talks and presentations from some of the world’s most interesting people.
Volunteer-hosted TED Circles let a small group of people watch a particular TED talk, then discuss it amongst themselves. Form a circle with your class or have your students form their own to dive deeper into important and controversial topics.
There are over 3,000 talks currently uploaded to the app. Users can watch talks or listen to them like a podcast. Users can even download them for later offline use. TED also lets you share your favorite talks and sync them across multiple devices.
Good for: Educators that want to expose their students to a broader range of topics
Price: Free (contains ads)
Availability: iOS and Android
Conclusion
One of the best ways to stay organized for teachers is to use a planner. Especially if you’re a teacher who prefers digital tools, rather than paper. By using Google’s calendar app along with some other tools, you can create an efficient teacher calendar that will help keep you organized on top of any classroom responsibilities you already have.