Supporting Students through Appointment Slots

A year ago, I wrote a blog post on how you could set up appointment slots in Google Calendar for people to sign up to reserve a time. This is a helpful process as it automatically shows up in your calendar. This feature can be used for many purposes, such as student conferencing and/or presentation time slots.

Well this year, I have a follow up to that blog post. This year, a humanities team decided to give their students an opportunity to choose what they wanted to learn, during a particular unit, and showcase to the rest of the class. Of course there were parameters as the learning had to be tied to an essential question.

Krystin Cooney and Jess Hatzidakis asked both the librarian (Jess Gilcreast) and I if we would be willing to help out their students when it came time for researching and finding the ‘right’ tool to showcase their work. Of course, we said yes! They clearly stated that they were not looking for Gilcreast and I to put together a presentation to the whole class. Instead, they wanted students to sign up for a time slot to meet with either of us to talk more specifics about their project. To be honest, Gilcreast and I thought that this was brilliant, especially since students had choice in what and how they were presenting to the class. Both the students and Gilcreast and I got more out of the conversation than if we spoke in front of the whole class. This is something that I hope to continue doing in the near future for other classes.

Process for Creating Appointment Slots

Krystin and Jess sent Gilcreast and I a couple of dates to choose from to be available to come into class. Gilcreast attended class a week prior to me seeing as though she was helping the students with research questions. I showed up the following week to help answer questions on putting ideas together.
Jess Hatzidakis then created the appointment slots for students to choose from. Want instructions on how to do this? CLICK HERE These appointment slots were created under her account. We had talked about how Jess Gilcreast and I could each create our own appointment slots but the teachers wanted to make it easier for the students to sign up and only have to look through one calendar. – Very smart thinking on her part!
Once a student signed up for a time slot, Jess Hatzidakis went into the calendar event and added either Gilcreast or myself to the appointment, depending on whether it was for research or type of tool question. I would then accept the invite and it showed up in my own calendar. The nice thing about appointment slots is that Google automatically adds the person who is requesting the time slot to the title. Very handy!

This image shows what my calendar looked like from students signing up. I just marked off in my calendar to be available from 11:00 – 2:30 for my own purposes. You will notice I had a meeting with 4 different student groups (12:10pm, 12:20 pm, 12:40 pm and 1:30 pm). I choose this mode so that you did not see student names associated to the calendar. This method was great as I knew exactly who I was helping prior to going to the classroom.