đź’ĄHow to EASILY Frontload google cal for the entire school year, and have MORE freedom and fun
Get ready to hit PAUSE a lot! In this vid I go FAST to help students figure out how to use Google Cal to make life EASIER, even if they don’t like planners. This is how I help students frontload the calendar, so all of the important dates for the entire year are in their calendar from day 1. It’s easy and makes life a lot less stressful.
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Video Transcript: Click here to download the transcript PDF.
Hey, what is up students? I hope you’re having a great day. Students, parents, teachers, anybody who cares about kids, but you students, I’m going to teach you in this video how to make your life easier by front-loading your Google Calendar. If you use Google Calendar, you can also use other online calendars to front-load your calendar. I’m going to show you how I do this with students. Students who don’t like calendars, who don’t like planners, to make your life easier, so you have less stress, more freedom, more fun. Now, in this video, what I’m going to do is show you how to set up your calendar and front-loaded for the school year with long term things. So the first thing that I want you to do is get into your Google Calendar or your Google inbox. If you’re in your inbox, just go right here, right here. We’re going to do it from right here and we’re going to go to the calendar. Again, you can also do it from right here with this little button. And you can open it up right there to get into your calendar. But I’m going to do it from right here. We’re going to open up Google Calendar because this is how I usually do it. And you can see this is what the month looks like in Google Calendar right now. And the next thing that I want you to do is to look up your school district and the word ‘calendar’. So the local school district here is BVSD. So whatever your school districts called, in the word calendar, and look here, it says the 2019-2020 PDF. We don’t want that, we want 2020-2021. I don’t see that here. But I do notice that right here, it shows them calendars approved for the school year. So let’s see what we can pull up here. Now I happen to know that this school district does two versions, we’re just going to look at one version right now. And this version that we see here is the 2020-2021 calendar. That’s what I want to see. If you notice here, it has the code on the bottom, you know this key that shows you what the whole thing means. But let’s say that you’re in 10th grade, August 20th is your first day. So August 20th is the first day of school for this school year. So what we’re going to do is we are going to go back to the Google Calendar, and we’re going to go to August 20th. I have all these examples, forget about those. And let’s say we say ‘First day of school,’ and plop that in there. And boom, it’s red. And it’s bright, and it’s easy to see.
Now the next thing that I want you to do, I told you I want you to front-load your calendar. And the reason I do this is my students, my middle, high school, and college students who don’t like calendars or planners, they love to front-load the calendar because it allows them to see when they don’t have school and they’re always excited to not have school. So for example, on September 7th, it’s Labor Day. So what I’m going to do on September 7th, is I’m going to go here, where is September 7th, here, and I’m not gonna say ‘Labor Day,’ I’m gonna say ‘No School,’ because let’s say as a student, that is exciting for me. But I know that it’s actually a three day weekend. And that’s kind of exciting to me. So I’m gonna say that it starts on September 5th, and ends on September 7th here. Check this out. When you save it, it’s a nice block. Now that red, I don’t want the red for this. I like the red for an alert color, and this is not an alert. I’m off. So maybe I think green because green light means go when I’m free. I’m off. So now in front-loading the calendar, I can see that in September, I have those days off. Well, do I have any other days off in September? The 21st is green, so what does that mean? If I look here, it says it’s ‘Teacher prep and workday,’ no classes for students. So great. September, I have another three day weekend. So I’m going to go here to the 19th, click in there and I’m going to write again ‘No School, yo,’ and maybe I’m going to go hiking or camping with somebody, or you know, go out of town for a weekend or whatever we’re doing, hang out friends, hang out family, whatever is going on.
I’m showing you a different way to do the color. I’m going to go through here, change the color again. Let’s say that I want to blue this time. And boom, look at what we have here. Oh, I didn’t do it right. So let me go back in here. I’m going to edit it by clicking ‘Edit’. And I’m going to change the dates here. So from September 19th, it goes to the 21st. I’m going to save that there. Now when I look at September, it really shows me that I have two, three-day weekends. I like that. I work very hard during the week on my school stuff. I like to know that I have those three day weekends. Come back to the calendar here we see October 12th is green. We have no school. We have a three-day weekend here. October 16th is this light blue. This light blue just says the quarter ends. I don’t need to put that in my calendar. October 30th is a bright blue, that’s the end of the trimester. I don’t really need to know that. November 11th. What’s that? It’s red. The 11th here is Veterans Day. No school then. And look, Thanksgiving Break. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. I’m going to put in just Thanksgiving Break right now and I’ll wrap up this video. So we go to November, and in November we have five days off. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. But it gets better Why?
Here’s why. This is the first day of Thanksgiving Break, I’m just gonna write ‘Break, no school’. And when I click on this and go to when it goes through, which is the 29th, and I save it, it’s not just five days off, it’s seven here, plus one + plus one, it’s nine days off, nine days of break. So that’s really nice to know. And we also know that on this day, the 11th, there’s no school because the Veterans Day, so we get to see that. Again, I want to change the color. If I right-click on this, maybe I changed that one to purple, I right-click on this, maybe I change this one to a gray, whatever color I want. But now I can see this.
Now, what front-loading means, students, is that what I want to encourage you to do is sit down with your school calendar and do this for the entire school year. From the first day to the last day. Get everything in your calendar right now that you possibly can. You do it once, it takes you a half-hour, and you’re done for the entire school year. Everything will pop up on your calendar, and it feels really good to know. Trust me, I’m telling you, my students like this. It takes a little bit to get it going. If you want a friend or a parent who is detail-oriented to help you sift through it, go ahead and do that. I also often have people print these calendars, put them on the fridge, put them on wherever you study, on the wall. But either way, this calendar is here for you.
I hope this was helpful to you. My name is Seth Perler. I’m an executive function coach in Colorado and I help students navigate this thing called education so that they can have a great life. But in particular, I work with students who are not into this stuff and help make life easier with more freedom, more fun, less stress, more success in school, and all of that sort of thing. If you liked this video, please give me a thumbs up, support it, leave a comment below, subscribe to my YouTube channel, share with someone and check out my website SethPerler.com for freebies. Parents and teachers, there’s a lot there for you. Have an amazing day! This is the only day you got right now, go enjoy it.