Launching to your community

Modified on Mon, 21 Oct, 2024 at 5:52 PM

Once you have tested your sync you are ready to disable pilot mode and launch SchoolCal to your community! Below we’ve included some optional steps to consider before launch and some sample language you can adapt to share with your students and faculty:

Pre-launch Steps to Consider

Launch by syncing just a limited date range

When you are ready to launch, one piece you will want to consider is how you roll out syncing. One option is to start by syncing events that fall in just a limited date range, such as the first month or first couple weeks of class, before expanding the date range. Doing so has a number of benefits:

The sync will occur more quickly so you will be able to double check that things look correct sooner.
You won’t have to wait for a large sync to complete to ensure the first few class meetings have been added.
You’ll be much less likely to run into Google limits around event creation; you can only create 100,000 events at a time, which larger schools may approach if you sync all future class events.
If you find that you’d like to make changes to event filters or the event template, future syncs will also take less time.
If people are slow to adjust their notification settings, only the first month/few weeks of events will be created with their original notification settings and their potentially unwanted reminders. They will have a bit of extra time (depending on how long before you sync more events) to adjust notification settings before future events are synced to their calendars.

You can use the Meeting Dates Filter on your flow to sync just a limited date range.

Launch by syncing a limited slice of events/attendees

Another option is to launch by syncing a limited slice of your events or attendees using event-level and attendee-level filters. Depending on your preference, this could mean rolling out:

just to a specific school level at a time (using the School levels event filter)
just for teachers (setting the Grade levels attendee filter to “Do not include any students as attendees”)
just for certain grade levels (using the Grade levels attendee filter)
just by syncing a certain type of classes (using the Course types event filter)

Each of these has the benefit, like above, that the initial sync will complete faster and that there will be fewer events when updates next sync. This also may mean that you can introduce SchoolCal to smaller groups at a time, potentially making communication easier. Finally, this may give you the chance to catch changes before introducing SchoolCal to everyone, so messaging might be able to be clearer when you launch fully.

On the other hand, if you do launch to just a segment of the school, events may appear slightly differently than their final state. For example, if you launch first to teachers and not students, no students will be included as attendees on events, so teachers may not discover some of the benefits of having a full guest list or being able to view a student’s class schedule via Google. This may then require a second round of messaging when the full launch occurs.

You will want to consider the balance of these benefits and drawbacks as you determine what is right for your school.

Tell your students and faculty about SchoolCal

When you’re ready to launch, you will also want to consider how you tell your community about what’s about to happen. If you’d like to send an email as part of that communication, we’ve included two templates below, one for faculty that could be adjusted to send to all faculty and staff, and one for students. We encourage you to edit these templates to match the settings and launch process you’ve chosen.

Sample Launch Language

Faculty

Feel free to adapt the following as needed. Check all the highlighted sections before sending as they may need to be updated based on your school’s settings:

Dear Faculty,

We are excited to announce that starting on ___(date)___ we will begin using SchoolCal, a tool that synchronizes your class schedule with Google Calendar. On that day you should see that academic classes* for which you are a teacher** appear automatically on your primary school Google calendar at the correct locations and times. Going forward, these events will be adjusted as changes occur. For those interested in additional details about the settings of SchoolCal-created events, details follow at the bottom of this email.

We hope that this will be a great help in keeping your schedule up to date and your free and busy times accurate on your primary school calendar. Since class schedules will be synced for all teachers and students, this should make scheduling meetings and finding common free time much easier for everyone at the school; just check the person’s availability in Google Calendar or use the "find a time" feature. By doing so, you will easily be able to establish convenient meeting times with teachers in your division or another. Students will be able to see when their teachers are free for extra help. Counselors and administrators will be able to find the least disruptive times to meet with one or more students.

You will not need to do anything to start this sync, however, prior to ___(date)___, we highly recommend that you adjust your Google calendar notification settings. The default calendar notification setting in Google adds an event reminder 10 minutes before every event, so if you’d prefer not to be notified 10 minutes before the start of each class, you should do one of two options:

Follow the instructions under “For all events” here to turn off notifications from Google calendar entirely
Follow the instructions under “For specific calendars” here to remove the default notification 10 minutes prior to events on your primary school calendar (when instructed to click the calendar you want to change, choose the calendar with your name)

To begin with, we will sync only the first month of classes. A week later, we will sync the rest of the classes for the semester***. If classes do not appear on your primary calendar during that first week, or if you notice errors about how your classes are syncing, please reach out to __(your school help email address)__.

__(Include your sign off here)__

Additional Details about SchoolCal-Created Events

When classes are added to your calendar, they will be added as individual calendar events with faculty and students in grades __ - __ added as event attendees. All attendees will automatically be marked as attending and busy during the event. The event details and the guest list will be publicly viewable to all employees and students at the school****.

The events that SchoolCal creates should not be edited because updates may overwrite the event. If you would like to edit or add to the event, you should duplicate the event to your own calendar and edit the copy as desired.

SchoolCal-created events will appear the same color as your primary calendar. If desired, you can change the color of your primary calendar or the color of non-SchoolCal-created events (brief instructions here) instead.

*add more types of classes as applicable based on your filters

**add more faculty roles as applicable based on your filters

***dependent on how you choose to launch, these statements may not be necessary, or they may need to include information about who should see events at what times.

****dependent on the settings selected within the event template

Students

Feel free to adapt the following as needed. Check all the highlighted sections before sending as they may need to be updated based on your school’s settings:

Dear Students,

We are excited to announce that starting on ___(date)___ your class schedule will be synchronized with Google Calendar. On that day you should see that your academic classes* appear automatically on your school Google calendar at the correct locations and times. Going forward, these events will be adjusted as changes occur.

We hope that this will be a great help in keeping your Google calendar accurate. Since class schedules will also be synced with Google Calendar for teachers**, this will make scheduling meetings and finding common free time easier any time you are trying to meet with a teacher** or other students - just check the person’s availability in Google Calendar or use the "find a time" feature.

Before this sync begins on ___(date)___, we highly recommend that you adjust your Google calendar notification settings. The default calendar notification setting in Google adds an event reminder 10 minutes before every event, so if you’d prefer not to be notified 10 minutes before the start of each class, you should do one of two options:

Follow the instructions under “For all events” here to turn off notifications from Google calendar entirely
Follow the instructions under “For specific calendars” here to remove the default notification 10 minutes prior to events on your primary school calendar (when instructed to click the calendar you want to change, choose the calendar with your name)

To begin with, we will sync only the first month of classes. A week later, we will sync the rest of the classes for the semester***. If classes do not appear on your calendar during that first week, or if you notice errors about how your classes are syncing, please reach out to __(your school help email address)__.

__(Include your sign off here)__

*add more types of classes as applicable based on your filters

**add more faculty roles as applicable based on your filters

***dependent on how you choose to launch, these statements may not be necessary, or they may need to include information about who should see events at what times.