 OTAN, Outreach and Technical Assistance Network. My name is Marjorie Olavidis. I'm a project specialist for the Outreach and Technical Assistance Network, OTAN, and I'd like to welcome you all to this month's OTAN Tech Talk. Our speaker today is Audrey Deirdor from Sweetwater Union High School District, and she's also one of our newest OTAN subject matter experts. Her topic today is appointment scheduling with the Google Calendar. Go ahead and take it away, Audrey. Thank you. Hi, everybody. So as Marjorie said, this is appointment scheduling with Google Calendar. Again, my name is Audrey Deirdorf. I am a resource teacher at the Sweetwater Union High School District Adult Education, and I'm also a subject matter expert with OTAN, brand new. So today, we're going to go through the different steps on how to create this Google Calendar. So just a little bit about me. I've actually been teaching in adult education for about 29 years now. Seems like a lifetime, but I've been privileged to work in many different areas, and technology happens to be one of them and Google. So I'm excited to share this with you. When we found it, I was trying to help our job coach, and the job coach is going to be meeting with different students, and so he needed an appointment schedule. So we found it by just kind of, oh, look what Google has. So I'm really excited to share this with you. So before we begin, some of the must-hats. One, you have to have a Google workspace for education, which means it's either you have a Google through school or through your district. It has to be workspace for education in order to use appointment scheduling. Or if you have a private account, you can always pay for a subscription that allows you to use this appointment slots feature. So hopefully you all have a workspace for education. If you don't and you find that it's very helpful and it's something that you can use, you can ask your district or your company to go ahead and purchase you a subscription that will allow you to use this feature. So here are our objectives for today. One, we want to learn how to create a bookable appointment schedule, and then how to share that appointment schedule. And then how do you edit? Like your administrator or somebody says, hey, we have a meeting. Oh, I forgot. How do you change your appointment schedule or time slots? So those are the three objectives for today. So we will go ahead and start. So first, I have all the steps to follow on the actual slide step. But I want to do a demonstration of it first by going to a Google tab and showing you. And then we'll come back and review the steps that are actually written. So this is why I'm not in the slideshow part of the slides presentation. So I can go back and forth from tabs to the slideshow. So what I will do is open my new tab. And so you can see here is the Google tab brand new and I will now go to my waffle, which is on the right hand side top corner to the left of my picture or icon. Now you do have to be signed in, signed in with your district or your school account or your public account that has this slot feature. So when I click the waffle or the grid, I will now look for the calendar icon and select the calendar icon. When that happens, you'll have your calendar and on the left hand side, you should see kind of a menu. If you don't see it, it's probable that this main menu, which we call the skinny hamburger, if you click it, it will show up. Or if you select it, the menu will show up. When you have the menu open, you will go ahead and select the create button. And at the very end of the list, at the very end of the list, you will see appointment schedule. So you will select appointment schedule. From here, you will see two things. On the left hand side, you see a menu that's basically a settings menu. And then on the right hand side, you will see the calendar. Now we are at Friday, so I will go ahead and move it over to next week. So on the left hand side, we're gonna direct most of our attention on the left hand side in the settings menu. The first thing you need to do is go ahead and name your appointment schedule. So I will just name it whatever you would like. Then underneath that, you have your appointment duration. How long do you want your appointments to go? Do you want them to go for 30 minutes? Do you want them to go for an hour? So you would select the 30 minute window and you can go ahead and select anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours, or you can custom. So if you custom and you click or select custom, you can now put in 20 minute slots, you can do one and a half hours, and then you would select done on the bottom corner. And now it changes to 20 minutes. So all my appointments will now be 20 minutes long. If you look at the calendar on the right hand side, you can see that it is creating it. As I am changing the settings, it's creating the calendar on the right hand side. So each little darker blue appointment slot, that's 20 minute slots right there. Okay, let's go to the next part underneath. And this is the kind of the meat and potatoes of this calendar. This is your availability, when are you available? So first of all, you can choose whether to repeat it weekly, or if you select this, you can say does not repeat. Let's see what happens when we see does not repeat. The first thing that happens is that week went away and now you're gonna be able to add it date by date. On the right hand side, you can see that the calendar went away. So if you would like to do it date by date, this is what you would select. I will now do it as a repeat weekly. So I went back to repeat weekly, and now you can see I have the Sunday through Saturday schedule. Now, the three letter day is on the left, then you're going to have the appointment times, the start time, and then the end time. After that, you're going to have an icon that means unavailable, the circle with the line through it. After that, you're gonna have an add button. So you can add more times to that day. And then the last icon you're going to see at the very end of this row is copying. You can copy this timeframe for all the days that are available. So let's see how we can adjust it. So I will choose Monday and I will select my start time. And actually I'm only available from 10 a.m. on Monday. And I'm only available until, where is my 11? There it is. I'm only available one hour. If you look on the right hand side, you'll notice that it changed. Look how different it is from Monday to Tuesday. So Monday you can only see 10 to 1020, 1020 to 1040 and 1040 to 11. So the rest of them are still at this 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. time slots. Now, if I wanted to copy, because really throughout my week, I'm pretty busy, these are the only times 10 to 11 is the only time that I'm gonna have available for appointments. I will now use this copy icon at the end of the row and select it and notice that on this settings menu, everything changed to 10 to 11, as well as on the calendar on the right hand side, everything changed from 10 to 11. It's pretty cool. I love that feature. So, but I'm also available usually from one to two each day, Monday through Friday. So what I will do is on this Monday row, I will do the middle icon, which is the add another period to this day and select that. And now I can change the time by selecting inside of the time slot, the beginning time slot, and I'm going to change it to one. And then I have to also do the same for the end time and select it to two. So now you can see on the calendar on the right, it has that one to two time slot just for Monday. So how do I copy it over? Again, gonna go to that Monday row, the last icon selected, and now it's copied to all days. So now Monday through Friday, I have 10 to 11 and one to two available for appointments. Again, remember we did 20 minutes appointment. So now what I'm going to do is for us at adult education, we don't have Friday classes. So I'm going to make this unavailable. So that would be the first icon that you see after the time slots and I will select unavailable and notice that Friday goes away. Now it still has it for the one to two. So I have to also do it for the one to two time slot. So there you go. And so now all my Fridays are gone. So that's how you kind of do your schedule. And then I will show you how to edit or how to change later down the road. So after that, you now have your scheduling window. If you select the scheduling window setting, you can schedule it to either be available now or you can determine what your start date and your end dates are. Let's start with start and end date. So I will select start and end dates and a box will pop open. You can say I want to start the schedule as of today or if you want to start at the following week, I'm going to say, and it pops up, I like this feature that it actually pops up a calendar. So I will now go ahead and say, I'm going to start my appointments as of September 12th, I will select that date by clicking on it or touching it depending on what you're using a computer or tablet. And then the end date, you can say never if you want it to go on forever for the rest of your life as long as you're working or using this or you can decide the end date. So I will decide the end date because we're actually going on fall break next week. So I will go ahead and click the 16th or the 15th to be my last day because fall break is coming. So I will click done. And now I've had the start and end dates. Now, if I wanted it to be available right now, let's go ahead and try that feature available right now. I don't have to do anything else, but now do the next part, which is in advance. How many days in advance? So I've started it today and for 60 days I will have these same appointments available to see by the students or the clients that I'm sending it to. Now, if you only want to do it for 30 days you would again click or select inside and use the up and down arrows. Or if you double select, then I would go ahead and with my keyboard type in 30 and now it only goes for 30 days. So looking to the calendar on the right, using the arrow, the right arrow to the left of September, if I click that notice, I will go 30 days and they will have it there already. Okay. Now let's go to the next part is how much time are you gonna give the student or the client the ability to book the appointment? So if you keep it at the default, which is four hours, that means if they want a one o'clock appointment with you, they have to book it by 9 a.m. the same day. So for me, I like to do it more time so maybe I'll do 12 hours or maybe I'll do 24 hours if you want full day in advance. So it's really up to you. Again, the default is going to be four hours. So going on from there, this is where you can adjust your availability. So I realized, oh no, on this, let me go back. On Tuesday, the 13th, I actually need to change my availability. So what I did was I selected the change a dates availability and I went and selected the 13th and I cannot do one to two. I can only do from three to four. So now I will change it from three and you have to select the end time as well, three to four. And notice on my schedule on the right hand side, it adjusted it for me. And so that's how you could do it in this settings menu. And then this last part of this menu is the booked appointment settings. So what this is great for is buffer time. Do you wanna jump from meeting to meeting? So 20 minutes and go straight to the next meeting. Or do you want time between? So I like to have time between if there's paperwork or I need to run to the restroom or something like that. So I will go ahead and select that as well as change it manually to 10 minutes. Again, you can use the up and down arrows. But if I now select off of that, notice how you now have buffer time on the schedule to the right. So you have this little white area in between the blues, which means that it is buffer time. And then how many do you have per day? So I only have four per day right now, but if I only wanted to schedule three appointments per day, and just give them the option of picking. So I give them all the time options that I have, but I'm only gonna take three appointments per day. This is where you would do that maximum bookings per day. So I will select here and I'm actually only gonna take three appointments per day because of my busy schedule. So now, even though there are four appointment slots on this calendar on the right, only three will be booked. And once that third is booked, the other one will go away. So the next part of this is the coloring of it. If you decide to do different booking schedules, you can color. So notice on my calendar on the right, I do have purple. And so this is a different booking calendar I had. And so this one is now blue. If I wanted to change the color over here on the settings menu, this last portion, you could go ahead and select the color you want it to be. So, and you can actually add a label to it if you would like and just say, this is the test, test label, or whatever you would like it to be. So notice how it changed the color in the menu. Okay, there is a second part of the settings menu. So at the bottom right of the settings menu, you'll have a blue with a white next button. So I will go ahead and select that. So now you will book a page, photo, and name. So this is how you can see what the student or the client sees. So if you select that, right now they see my name, they see my picture. So this is how your identity is gonna actually be displayed on the booking page. So you can always manage it by going to this blue, manage Google account, photo, and name if you wanted to change your name and photo. The next part is the location. So are you gonna meet online? Are you gonna meet in person? So you can choose different locations. So if I selected this choose location button, notice you can do a Google Meet video conferencing. You can decide to do it in person, a phone call, or if you're gonna use a different conferencing platform like Zoom, like we're on right now, or if you're going to use Teams, you can go ahead and put none or specify it later. And then you will have to manually update. And that's okay. So I will go ahead and choose the none for right now. Okay, after I choose the location, you will now have a description. So here is what you can show the student or tell the student what you expect them to bring with them to the appointment or what the appointment is for. So for example, here the note, and I love that it has, you can bold it, you can underline it so that you can basically highlight what you want them to bring. So please bring your homework to the appointment, right? And so I can go ahead and go ahead and bold that and make sure that they know a please bring your homework. Then the next part is the booking form. So when you share your booking page, which I will show you in a few minutes, they have to fill out a form. And so you can determine what goes on that form. Reminder, the little information you ask for probably the better for the students, but you can choose different things. For example, default, first name, last name, and email address, those are required, but you can add an item. If you wanted to add an item, you could add a phone number, or you can customize an item. So like an ID, if you're wanting them to bring their student ID number, or if you want them to put in, I don't know, there's so many different things, like some type of ID or some type of, I don't know. So there's other things that you can do. So you can add the item and then notice that when you add an item again, the only thing left is custom. So you can only do up to five things. They won't let you go beyond that. And then if you want them to require email verification, this is if you have a lot of spam coming to your email. And so you just wanna make sure that you're getting the correct emails from students and not from spammers. You can require email verification. And then the last part of this, before we save all of our settings is going to be your reminders and your confirmation. So you and the person who made the appointment will get a confirmation email. And in it, it will have a calendar invitation so that if you don't use Google Calendar and you use your Outlook Calendar, you can actually save it to your Outlook Calendar. And if the student uses Google Calendar, it can save that or it can save it to whatever calendar the student uses. Then an email reminder, you can set that if you want the email reminder five minutes beforehand, a day before, and you can actually add different reminders. So if you're like me, very forgetful and you wanna add different reminders like a day before, two days before, you can always select the add reminder and it will give you as many reminders as you want. One day before, 30 minutes before and 10 minutes before. Okay, now all you have to do at the bottom right is click your save button. And now it's saved. So let me go back to your appointment scheduling slides. So all of these steps are here. It looks like I'm running out of time. So I'm just going to go to the next part since I just demonstrated all that is about reserving appointments. So after completing your bookable appointment schedule, it's gonna send you the booking page link which looks like this number two here. And so you wanna select this white share button, not open booking page. And then you're gonna share a single booking page which is this picture number three. Then you will select the white button on the bottom left corner of the pop-up box that says copy link, okay? So then you can go ahead and copy that link and paste it into an email, a webpage, a Google classroom at any place that you would actually pay something and anyone can reserve a slot. It's not just for students who have a school account, it can be anyone. Now, it might be tricky if you did that, reserve it by email notification. So you probably would want to deselect that so that anyone can. The only requirement is an email address is required. So if you wanna reserve a time slot. And then we can also add guests to appointments and I can show you that right now by... So if you notice in this, when you see your calendar if it has a grid, this four boxes, that is actually your testing schedule or your booking schedule. So the one that doesn't have it is the actual appointment. So the appointment slot with the grid icon is the booking appointment schedule and the one without is the actual booking that the student did with you. When you do this, when you do this, you click on or select the appointment, the student appointment, the editing tool will pop out and you can see on the right hand side, you can add guests and you're gonna add them by their email address. So your name and whoever booked the appointment will already be on there. Your name and the student's name or whoever booked the appointment will already be on there. But now you can add guests. Maybe you wanna bring in a teacher. Maybe you wanna bring in a support person. Maybe you wanna bring in a counselor, something like that. So you can add guests to the appointment to join you. So let me go ahead and show this real quick. This is what it looks like in real time. So you would click this share button, like we said. So it popped up, share this and then you want the single booking page and you copy your link and then you click done. So that's what that looks like. If you wanted to edit this, you would have this pencil on the left of the delete button. You would select this icon and your settings would then come back and you could go ahead and go through it and change the date as you see fit. So that's how you do it. And now when it sends it to the student, what'll happen is, let me click on this. I'm gonna open the booking page so you can see what it looks like. So I will, when you send it and they open the link, this is what they see. They're going to see your name and photo if you have it and then they'll be able to just select any timeframe and fill out that booking form and then click book. And then it's confirmed you can go ahead and you can cancel the appointment if you want or if you close it, notice that that time now went away. So that's how you do it. I hope you'll find it helpful and thanks for coming today. Thank you, Audrey for all of that great information. Otan would also like to thank all of you for coming to this tech talk. If you have an ed tech tool or some tips that you'd like to share with the adult ed field, email your idea to support at otan.us. We also encourage you to subscribe to the OTAN YouTube channel where you can view archive tech talks as well as other OTAN videos. You can also contact OTAN for additional services including professional development at your site. Just visit the OTAN website at www.otan.us or contact us by phone or email. And thank you again for watching today's OTAN Tech Talk.