Google Apps Marketplace: You Can Book Me

In my current position as a long term substitute at a local high school, I have found a few instances when an electronic calendar would be very helpful. Like when people intentionally overbook the schedule. *Facepalm*

FacePalm
Image from: Joshua M. Neff.
Licensed under Creative Commons

Knowing that the district has Google Apps, I decided to browse through the marketplace to see if there were any scheduling add-ons. That is when I found, http://youcanbook.me/

The solution looked promising. I did a quick web search to see if anyone is using it out in the school library world. Sure enough Chad Lehman, @imcguy, is all over it. Check out his post on the Discovery Education Network Blog to see how he has integrated http://youcanbook.me/ for scheduling. After a short conversation with Chad I decided to do a proof of concept.

Creating a bookable calendar is very easy.  You can use either your own personal GMail account or a Google Apps for education account. Simply click register or login. Then enter your GMail or GoogleApps email account. You can create a bookable schedule for any calendar in you gcal list. In the case of a school library you can create a calendar for any resource that you need to manage i.e. a calendar for each computer lab and a calendar for the library proper.

You can easily set the time that the day starts and the day ends and also arrange the booking time, in that way it is easy to approximate the time slots of any school day. But if your "booking period", which in this case is "school hour of the day", changes from day to day you can't reflect that on your booking calendar. Not the best solution in a high school setting.

If you are in a school setting when periods of the day are less regimented then this is a wonderful solution. I think with a little practice and a little patience you can make this solution work in a middle/high school too.

Here is what your you can book me calendar looks like (you can easily embed it into a web page with an iframe code):




If you want to have transparency about how your lab is getting booked you can also easily embed the lab calendar using the calendar embed code in your Google Account:

Encyclopedia Brittanica

In 1989 the encyclopedia salesman knocked on my parents rental home.  One month later we owned what is now espoused as the most advanced encyclopedia in existence.  Were my parents brilliant prognosticators or did they fall victim to agressive door to door sales tactics?
I don't know, but I do know that they definitely had some buyer's remorse when they went around belittling my friends parents who purchased Funk and Wagnall at the grocery store. Why the personal narrative?  Well, I wanted to introduce my memory again of reading the encyclopedia and comment one of the fun parts of browsing Britannica that I don't get anymore.  Cassell and Hiremath call it the "element of serendipitous knowledge."
On my way to frogs, I probably accidentally ran into frozen food or freemasonry or fringe movements etc.  You get the point.  I kind of miss that.  Now my wandering/wondering mind has to click through the boring related hyperlinks.  Who wants that? I would rather imagine random connections between radical freemasons hooked on frozen food frog legs from France.

Overheard in the library:

While working on the "Why I Need My Library Video Contest" 

Girl 1: This video is going to be hard because our library is so nice.
Girl 2: What do you mean?
Girl 1: It is going to be hard to make it look like we need money because our library is so nice.
Girl 2: The point is not to make the library look bad and beg for money. They point is to show how important our library is to us.

+1 for realizing how awesome the library is!

Transitions

I sent 25 emails on Friday. I was tying up the lose ends as I transitioned out of life as a graduate assistant and into my temporary role as the Library Media Specialist at a local high school. Each outgoing email was like watching my assistantship flash before my eyes. I was closing the door on two years of relationships and projects and opening new doors to the future.

With this transition, I have found that mind is freed to dream new dreams in a new space. Albeit a much more confined space. My contract puts me into the library for the remaining 3 months of the school year. I've chatted with a few of my librarian superstar contacts and their advice is to focus on being a learning centered librarian and developing collaborative projects.

I was at the movie theater this afternoon and a flood of ideas hit me. I stepped out to jot them down and here is what I came up with as possible goals/activities:

• Bathroom Library Newsletter complete with QR codes
• Reading Motivation Project - Guys Read - Spring/Summer activities focused
• Laminated maps of local lakes with fishing books and a link to a Google Maps fishing report mashup
• Short film contest - TBD
• Collaborative projects with at least one teacher in every grade level, and every major subject area
• Seasonal reading collection displays
• Information literacy and research presentations in all ninth grade language arts classes