Showing posts with label calendar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label calendar. Show all posts

Saturday, 21 March 2009

Using Outlook's Calendar to 'invite' students

To follow on from Anne's post about arranging meetings using Doodle, let's look at how to send students an invitation for a lesson using Outlook.

I find this function is very useful for some groups and one-to-one students who cancel regularly or where companies have a policy that the have to be more than a certain number of students before the lesson can take place.

First, open Outlook and go to your calendar. If the lesson is already shown in your calendar, double click on it. If it isn't in your calendar you will need to add it by double clicking on the day the lesson will take place and adding the relevant details (Subject, Location, Start time, etc.)

Now click on the 'Invite Attendees' button at the top and add the email addresses of the students you want to 'invite' to the lesson.

When you have finished, click on send.

A copy of the invitation is sent to all the students and they then have three options 1) to accept the invitation, 2) to accept it tentatively and 3) to reject the invitation.

As soon as they click on one of those options, Outlook will send you an email letting you know whether they have time or not and if they accept, the lesson will be added to their calendar.

It's simple, fast and can sometimes saves you from a trip to a group of students who don't have time for a lesson.

Friday, 20 March 2009

Arranging a meeting online

How can you arrange a meeting with your students? Don't send them an email with several suggestions and then work something out from their various responses. Do what the MELTA board does when they want to meet: Go online to www.doodle.com and set up an online survey (Umfrage). Lisa Förster showed us how:
  1. Click on "Termin finden", type in a title (eg "English course pub night"), an optional description and your name.
  2. Go to the next page and select possible dates.
  3. Continue to the next page and type in possible times.
  4. Then select "Fertigstellen" to create your survey.
  5. On the next page, follow "Link zur Teilnahme" to go to the survey.
  6. Highlight the URL in the survey window ( e.g. our sample is http://www.doodle.com/emp6c86a2e5rvv6n) and copy it into an email to send to your students.
  7. OR if you have a blog or forum, go to "Einbinden" and copy the code on that page into your blog/forum to create a link like this:

You can be the first to respond, like I was in this sample, but the dates will probably suit you as you suggested them. Go ahead and test the links and take part in this "Unfrage" so you see how it works. You can't break anything :)
Any questions or problems? Ask Auntie Web.