Free School Calendar

With most of the US currently experiencing the coldest temperatures in recent years, Intand’s Tandem event management software can be an effective tool for schools to stay ahead of the curve and “winterize” when the weather turns bad.

• To close or not to close? School administrators have to consider many factors – from the weather report to building conditions and transportation resources when making the decision to close or delay school openings due to weather conditions. Tandem can assist in the decision making process by providing an overview of what programs and events will be affected.

• Communicate closings and school delays quickly. No more waiting for the local radio or television station to announce your school’s name. By using Tandem administrators can instantly alert parents, students and teachers when school opening is delayed or canceled.

• Keep students from being stranded in the cold. After school activity canceled due to weather? Early school closing? Buses delayed? Using Tandem, administrators, teachers and coaches can alert parents quickly, helping to ensure that students stay warm and safe.

• Avoid burst pipes and other weather calamities. Using Tandem to identify building and room usage, facilities manager can efficiently plan and direct resources to avoid burst pipes and other potential weather calamities that can be costly and time consuming. In addition, faculty and facilities staff can quickly alert involved stakeholders when there is a problem – so that room changes and adjustments can be made with minimal disruption.

• Transportation management. Bad weather often translates to last minute transportation changes and juggling. Tandem allows all stakeholders to communicate rapidly and coordinate transportation resources more effectively so that bad weather doesn’t have to translate into a costly, transportation nightmare.

• Avoid influenza and H1N1 outbreaks. Winter usually brings flu season. By utilizing Tandem administrators can keep families informed of community or school resources for vaccination and work together to avoid outbreaks.

Image source http://www.flickr.com/photos/laserstars/

Want to learn more? Sign up for a free demo or a 30 day free trial of Tandem for Schools.

Current economic conditions have many schools searching for ways to reduce costs without sacrificing a quality education.

Using Tandem for Schools, schools can not only improve communications with parents, staff and faculty but also more effectively manage school resources.

Facilities Management
Many school facility managers already use Tandem to avoid overbooking facilities or to resolve scheduling conflicts. Knowing when and how often a facility or room is used, Tandem can also help facilities managers better allocate budget dollars and achieve energy and other savings.

Identify New Revenue Opportunities
Many schools have venues which may be underused at different times of the year; by using Tandem, schools can identify these resources and potentially turn them into revenue generating sources by renting them out to outside groups, etc.

Transportation Management
How many buses? When? Where? Tandem allows for rapid fire communication to all stakeholders involved in an event. Tandem allows coaches, teachers and administrators to more effectively manage trips and reduce transportation costs. And advanced planning features allow school districts to budget transportation needs more effectively. Translation: more opportunities to save money.

School Administration
With multiple events at multiple venues going on at all times of the day, one last minute change can often lead to hours of work for staff and managing the calendar can be more than a full-time job. With Tandem, one change doesn’t have to lead to hours of phone calls and running around to parents, staff, etc. With Tandem, the minute the change happens, everyone can be updated instantaneously. One school district even was able to reduce the number of staff managing their calendar from two full time personnel to just one.

Lower Printing Costs
Rather than printing out school calendars and fliers reminding parents and students about upcoming school events, using an online school calendar can save time that is required to print out hundreds of documents and reduce the amount spent on paper and ink.

Sign up for Intand’s free yearly online calendar.

Tandem for Schools, Intand’s premium online school calendar software, now offers text message integration so that users can receive text message updates of the school events that they care about.

Parents, students, and faculty can be away from the computer for most of the day, but many people carry around a cell phone with them at all times. If they have a user account with their school’s Tandem calendar they can change their preferences so that selected updates get sent directly to their phone via text message.

Currently users can log in and set reminders for specific events so that an email will be sent to their email inbox to remind them of an event within a specified time before the start of the event. You can also get email updates sent for all changes or new events for a specific group like Girls Varsity Soccer or Drama Club.

Text integration of a school calendar can improve school communication and save time for parents students and faculty. For instance, say you are a busy parent driving to a school baseball game, which has been canceled due to rain. You may receive a text message on your phone alerting you of this if you have signed up to track events for Boy’s Baseball and have them sent to your phone. Say you are a principal of the school and you want to alert students, parents, and faculty that school will be delayed for 2 hours due to an unexpected snow storm. You can add an event to the school calendar under a group called “Important School Notifications”. Now everyone who has signed up to track this group and receive text updates in their Tandem account can be notified of this important information via a text message.

Interested to learn more about Tandem school calendar software? Set up a free 1 on 1 demonstration on your computer here.

Software is increasingly changing the way we perceive common tools of everyday life such as books and calendars. Before a computer became common in every home and classroom, we were accustomed to paper based systems for activities such as reading or finding out what events are happening at school. Just as the Kindle for the iPod has altered the book industry by enabling almost instant access to millions of books, school calendar software has transformed the way school administrators, teachers, students, and parents interact with the school calendar. And like other tools in society that have been replaced by software, school calendar software has many advantages.

Eliminate paper-based systems
Paper based calendars are not very efficient by today’s standards. Traditionally school districts may have sent out a paper annual calendar to all students families. These calendars would be pretty empty except for school holidays. Many schools would also send out a monthly newsletter or flier home with students that described upcoming events. This would often require hundreds or thousands of pages of paper to be printed out, and often the information was out of date as soon as it was received. School calendar software allows schools to publish events to an online calendar that is instantly accessible to everyone who goes to the calendar’s web page on their internet browser. This can also save lots of paper and ink.

Increased event awareness
Another advantage of school calendar software is that it can raise awareness of what is going on at the school. While a paper calendar that you stick to your fridge can be a reference for what events are happening at the school, a calendar that sits on a web page can be far more informative. An online school calendar can show every event that is going on at the school with detailed information about the place, time, directions, contacts, etc. Instead of a sheet of paper that can be lost in transit or misplaced, online school calendars are always accessible from anywhere you have access to the internet. Students and parents always know where to go to find out what is happening at the school, which encourages school participation.

Improved School Facilities Management Process
Before school calendar software solutions, managing and scheduling use of school facilities could be a major project. The school administrator may have to account for a large number of school groups and scheduling conflicts could be common. Requesting use of a facility could take days or weeks, with the back and forth phone tag or email tag. School calendar software makes this facilities management easy with automatic conflict detection, and a simple and streamlined facilities request and approval process.

Real Time Information Updates
If there is a change in the time of an event, or a school cancellation due to inclement weather, school calendar software can display this change on the main calendar almost instantly after a school administrator makes the change. In contrast a paper calendar takes a very long time to update and is useless for school cancellations or same day changes. Being able to check the status of an event or school cancellation online is very convenient to parents and can prevent lots of phone calls to the office. With some online school calendars like Tandem for Schools, parents can also sign up for automatic email updates when the status changes for an event.

1. Easily access the calendar from any web browser
Tandem for Schools is a web based online calendar so parents can access the calendar by simply going to the school’s unique URL. This enables parents to be able to access the school’s calendar from any location even if it’s not their own computer. You can also access it from mobile devices with an internet connections like an iPhone or Blackberry.

2. Filter events
Schools that use Tandem for Schools often add all events for the entire school on the main school calendar. If you are a parent that is only interested in specific groups that your child belongs to such as varsity soccer or drama, you can easily filter the view to show only these events.

3. Search events
If there is a specific event that you want to find more information on Tandem has a useful search feature. Say you wanted to see what concerts were coming up. Just type in “concert” in the search box and Tandem will show all the concerts.

4. Obtain detailed information about an event
By clicking on an event on the calendar you can see a more detailed view with information like participants, contacts, supervisors, miscellaneous info, and trip information if applicable.

5. Export individual events to your personal calendar
From the individual event view you can export the event into your personal calendar such as Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, or Cozi.

6. Synchronize your personal calendar with the school events you are interested in
Tandem allows you to sync with your personal calendar like Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar, and Cozi. It can automatically post events that you have filtered on your Tandem Calendar to your personal calendar.

6. Keep track of groups you are interested in
Another useful feature of Tandem for Schools is the group tracking feature. If you are logged in and view a specific event, you can click on “track this group”. You will receive email updates of events that this group is involved in, including any changes that are made.

7. Get directions to an event
Simply click on the “get directions” link on the event detail view and Tandem will redirect you to Google Maps with the event destination already filled in.

8. Set a reminder for an event
Busy parents can have a hard time remembering all the events that their children are involved in. Tandem for Schools can send you an email to remind you of a specific event. Simply log in, click on an event, and click “set reminder”. You can specify the time that you want the reminder sent, such as 2 hours before the event, and a notification will automatically be sent to your email.

If you are a parent who would like their school calendar to do more, you can request that your school consider Tandem for Schools here.

Edutopia has an article about using Google Calendar as your school calendar titled Online Calendars: Virtual Schedules Help Busy Educators.

“The first tool I’d like to explore is the online calendar. Keeping an electronic calendar is nothing new, but you’d be surprised at how few people use one. It took me several years to let go of my paper-based day planner, but once I settled into the digital-calendar world, I never looked back.”

Google Calendar is a great improvement over a static page that lists key dates for the school year, which may or may not be accurate. Google Calendar is a free online calendar web application that is easily accessible to parents, students, and staff by going to the designated web page. It can also be embedded directly on a web page. In short, it is a quick and easy solution for a basic web calendar.

While Google Calendar is a good basic calendar, it lacks a lot of functionality that schools needs to manage school events and facilities. Tandem was designed specifically with schools in mind, so it performs several functions that help make school administrators jobs easier and helps communicate school information more effectively to staff, students, and parents.

Making School Administrators Jobs Easier
Tandem for Schools goes way beyond Google Calendar, with a built in request system that streamlines facilities requests. School staff simply logs in and clicks on “Submit Event Request” from the “Requests” section of the dashboard. The administrator in charge of the calendar simply receives the requests and can approve or deny it. There’s no paperwork or phone/email tag needed. Tandem automatically checks for any schedule conflicts, avoiding double booking of facilities. This system makes it much easier to coordinate the multiple sports teams and other school groups.

It is also very simple to make changes to the calendar, when times change, and parents and students see those changes reflected right away. Schools have reported much fewer phone calls because there is a simple real time source of information for parents.

Tandem for Schools has a dedicated support staff that will help you get up and running fast and answer any of your questions.

Communicate More Effectively
While Google Calendar is a good basic internet calendar, it can be hard to read at times, since the name of the event often gets cut off. Google Calendars boxes are a fixed size so it can quickly get cluttered and unreadable. Tandem for Schools has a better design and layout from a usability standpoint with boxes that expand dynamically so that you can easily read all the event names. It is also easy for viewers of Tandem for Schools to filter the calendar to show only events that are relevant to them. Since Tandem for Schools is much less cluttered than the Google Calendar, you can fit a lot more events on the Tandem for Schools calendar. This helps everyone get a big picture of everything that is going on at the school, which encourages students and parents to get involved in extracurricular activities.

An example of a school using Google Calendar:

Tandem for Schools Calendar:

Interested in learning more? Sign up for a free 1 on 1 demo on your computer (via Go To PC) or sign up for a free 30 day trial of Tandem Plus.

Tandem for Schools is a complete school calendar solution that helps schools manage events and facilities and communicate with parents and students. You can sign up for the free Tandem Basic annual school calendar here.

The full version offers all the features that you will need to manage all of your school’s events.

• Organizes all of your school’s and district’s events within a single, online calendar
• Communicate easily and effectively with staff, students and parents
• Update the calendar quickly and easily when changes occur
• Sync the school calendar to personal calendars like iCal, Google Calendar, Cozi, and Outlook
  
• Simple facility request system
  
• School bus transportation management to events

Learn more by visiting Intand.com or Schedule a Free 1 on 1 Demonstration on your computer.

Tandem for Schools is a tool that can more effectively manage a schools events, facilities, and school groups. School administrators have a difficult job of managing all the logistics of school events with the countless school groups and constantly changing circumstances. School management system software like Tandem for Schools makes this job easier.

Simple System For Planning and Managing School Events
Firstly, Tandem for Schools is a management system for all the schools events and brings all the different school group’s events onto a main school or district calendar that is viewable to everyone online.

It simplifies the scheduling process through a simple request and approval system. School staff send requests for a school facility at a certain time, and the school administrator approves or denies it. Once approved, the event is posted on the school’s online calendar, communicating the event to staff, students, and parents. When a proposed event conflicts with an existing event, the administrator is automatically notified and they can send a notice back to the requester to change the time and place or they can override it.

Jody Stephan from Boardman Schools liked how it made planning easier for school staff.

It allows all departments to see what is scheduled within the building so there are no surprises…We are able to see the whole picture of all building events in one place. This prevents conflicting events being scheduled. I love the feature of not being able to schedule a conflict unless you override it.

Reduce Phone Calls to School
In addition to making it easier to plan school events, Tandem for Schools is a powerful communication medium. When events are published by administrators to the school calendar, they are visible for reference for parents. Changes are reflected in real time so parents can find out if the game time is moved back an hour, or if the baseball game has been rained out. This also prevents routine calls to the school about dates and times for school events such as early dismissal or teacher workshop days, because the parents can easily access this information by going to an easy to remember web address.

Terry Foster from Bellevue Christian School says Tandem has sharply reduced calls:

If you think about it, if we changed one game, then we’d have to communicate this to 15 – 20 players, as well as 40-50 parents. Each of them would call our office asking for the same information. That’s more than 50 calls regarding just one game change. Sometimes we would cancel 2-3 games a day. Our office just wasn’t equipped to communicate this information quickly enough.

Improved Communication Throughout School
Having an accessible online calendar is more effective than a paper calendar because changes and new events are reflected immediately. Instead of having a calendar for each group, all the events are schedules are consolidated onto a main calendar, which can be filtered or customized to an individual’s preferences.

Vicki Storey from Santa Ynez Valley Union High School

This is the greatest communication tool we have on campus. It saves me hours a week. The program itself is easy to use and the information is instantly available to our community. What more could you ask for?

If interested in learning more about Tandem for Schools, you can sign up for a 1 on 1 demo with a Tandem expert.

If your school leadership is interested in building a larger and stronger community around your school, there are many online tools that can help.

Facebook
Facebook is the largest social network in the world with over 300 million active users and growing. Students have widely adopted Facebook as a tool to communicate with their friends, while the 35 and over age group is the fastest growing group on Facebook. A Facebook group for your school can be a place where students and parents can go to connect with other members of the community. Facebook groups also have a discussion board where members of the community can discuss topics.

Tandem
Tandem for Schools is an online school calendar that displays all the school’s events in one place. Parents and students can go to the real time online calendar to find out what events are going on, which increases participation. For instance, if parents know when and where PTSA meetings are being held, it is much easier to plan on attending. It also helps students find out about clubs that are meeting so they can participate in the extracurricular events they are interested in. When parents and students are more involved in school activities, it strengthens the school community.

Blogs
Blogs, which originated as online journals, have become powerful communication tools which can also be used by schools to build community. For instance teachers typically have a distant relationship with parents. They may talk a couple times a year at a parent-student conference. However, this is an important relationship that can be developed through online social tools like a blog. A teacher can post on their blog to explain what concepts they are studying, what students should be working on, and how parents can help. Parents can post comments on the blog posts, to provide feedback or discuss topics.

Twitter
Twitter, like many of the other tools, is a one to many communication tool. A principal can send a Tweet that will be read by parents, teachers, and students. It can also build community because of the retweet feature. Say you are following the principal who retweets (RT) a message by the PTSA (parent teacher student association) that they need volunteers. Followers of the principal can now follow the PTSA’s tweets and a new connection is created in the community. Twitter is most useful via SMS on your cellphone, where you can follow what people are talking about in your community and join the conversation, even if you are away from your computer.

An online school calendar can be very beneficial for a school, parents, and students. Here are 5 things you may not know that online school calendars can do.

1. Subscribe to an RSS feed

Online school calendars can have an RSS feed which will allow you to receive updates in any RSS feed reader such as Google Reader, MyYahoo, Bloglines, etc.

2. Sync your personal calendar with school events

Chances are that you use some type of online calendar or desktop based calendar client like Outlook. Wouldn’t it be great if you could automatically populate the calendar you already use with important school events? Additionally, with Tandem for Schools, if you are only interested in the High School Varsity Soccer schedule, you can filter and sync only these events to your calendar.

3. Get automatic email updates and reminders

You can request to receive an email if there are any changes to an event. In Tandem you would click on the event on the calendar and when the details come up you would click on “Email Me Updates”. You can also click on “Set Reminder” to receive an email reminder before an event.

4. Reserve a facility for a event or meeting

If you are a coach, club leader, PTSA leader, ect, you can request a school facility for an event. Once the calendar manager approves the request you will have the room or gym reserved. Tandem for Schools automatically ensures that another party doesn’t book the same facility at the same time. Also, school facilities could be better utilized by the community and the school could even raise money by renting out facilities.

5. Create a custom personal school calendar

You may not be interested in all the groups at the school. Tandem for Schools makes it easy to create a custom calendar that tracks only the groups that you are interested in. For instance if a parent has a child that participates in soccer and jazz band, and they want to be involved in the PTSA, they can create a custom calendar with only events from those groups.