[seul-edu] Calendaring

[Tonnesen Steve <tonnesen@cmsd.bc.ca>]

There was so much excitement generated on my previous post about
calendaring, I thought I'd post again.

Okay, so there was no excitement.  :)

I still think it's a good idea.  I decided to try my hand at it when I saw
a school webmaster generating a monthly schedule for his school using
tables in an HTML editor.  Every month, he would go through and manually
remove all the numbers from the boxes and add them back in again in the
right spot.  He asked if there was a better way, and I said "Of course!".

My eventual goal here is to have several "levels" of events:

1.  District Events - first day of school, non-instructional days,
                      holidays

2.  School Events   - Dances, exam schedules, assemblies

3.  Group Events    - Schedules for individual classes, could list
		      assignment due dates, test dates, etc.

4.  Personal Events - Big date on Friday night, study with friend on
 		      Tuesday afternoon, etc.


The calendars for district and school events could be publicly viewable so
that parents could view them online from the district web page.

Group and Personal events would require a login and membership in the
group.

I've never used Microsoft Exchange's calendaring application, but my
understanding is that you can do things like:

- View someone else's calendar to see when they are available.  There
  must be some permissions control on this to determine who can see who's
  calendar? 

- Invite others to a meeting and an available time slot from everybody's
  calendar will be found and scheduled. 


I'm not sure how useful these would be in a school setting.  Teachers may
want to be able to view a student's timetable.  I know here in British
Columbia we have a Personal Planning curriculum where students have to
maintain a timetable as part of their coursework.


Okay, if anybody has read this far, I've made some advances in my calendar
program (http://k12admin.cmsd.bc.ca/): 

1.  Daily time schedule now works
2.  Recurring events show up in the daily time schedule
3.  Conflicts are flagged (in the daily time schedule, monthly and yearly
    calendars)
4.  Graphic numerals are now an option (currently disabled, as I can't
    get my proxy server to cache graphics that require authentication
    information)
5.  Times can be entered in 24 hour or am/pm format. 


Steve.