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| 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:
