Calendarfly

 

What is CalendarFly?

CalendarFly is a free, on-line scheduling tool for schools, teachers, students, parents, coaches, administrators, and others. It automatically maintains and updates the individual schedules of everyone in a school community, making it easy for them to connect and meet their responsibilities.

CalendarFly is simple to use:

• Every member has his or her own Personal Calendar. You can enter your own events easily and quickly and you automatically see events and assignments of groups you belong to on your personal calendar. This is your personal homepage and it's really the only page you need to use. Even group leaders can enter events for the group from their personal calendars!
• If you belong to a group - a math class, soccer team, the marching band, church group, your family, and any other real-life groups of individuals who want to communicate with each other, the group's events and information automatically appear on your Personal Calendar.
• When a Group leader creates a Group, CalendarFLy automatically creates a Group Calendar. Group events are entered by the team leader (teacher, coach or other leader someone designated by the leader). Once the Group is created, the teacher or coach enters information just once (either from their personal calendars or the group calendar) and it appear automatically on the personal calendars of everyone in the group (and, for students, on their parents' personal calendars).

Typical students may have five classes, play a sport and participate in an after school activity, belonging to 7 groups. When they log onto CalendarFly, they immediately see all their own upcoming events, homework, and practices on their own Personal Calendars.

For students under age 19, their parents may opt to have their children's assignments and events also flow to their own Personal Calendars, making it easy for them to schedule time and track assignments.

 

How Can CalendarFly Help Make My Life Easier

Schools

CalendarFly was built with schools in mind. With CalendarFly, teachers have a simple an easy way to assign homework, tests, projects, and any other event. CalendarFly allows each teacher to enter an assignment or information just once and have that information appear on the personal calendars of each student in that class or team -- and, where appropriate -- on their parents' personal calendars.

Because CalendarFly works for more than just schools, both students and parents are more likely to utilize the amazing organizational power that CalendarFly has to offer.

Scheduling for students and teachers is not a new idea, and there are alternatives to CalendarFly, but CalendarFly improves upon current alternatives in four important ways.

• Current educational software products are expensive, whereas CalendarFly is free.
• Educational software products only work for schools, while CalendarFly has broad appeal, working equally well for schools, families, sports teams, friends, etc. This increases overall adoption and helps tracking because users will check it more frequently, not just for homework.
• Most educational software products require parents and students to check multiple pages, whereas CalendarFly instantly displays all upcoming assignments and events on each individual's personal calendar. It's all right there. .
• Most educational software products have complex user interfaces, making them difficult to learn and use. CalendarFly is easy to use even for the most technologically un-savvy.

 

Sports Teams and Organizations

CalendarFly is an amazing tool for both coaches and players. Handing out paper calendars or schedules, as well as phone trees and long email chains are a thing of the past with CalendarFly. Coaches only have to enter the schedule once, in one place, and every player knows exactly when and where they have to be.

Using CalendarFly, a coach can know who is attending the next game, and who cannot. A coach can quickly and easily tell all players which uniform to where and if there is a change in the location.

 

Families

CalendarFly is a family tool. CalendarFly helps families stay connected in an easy and responsible manner. Only one family member has to enter when the cousins are coming to town and everyone knows they need to come home ON TIME that day. Share photos within the family and know that they will have the privacy you demand.

CalendarFly can finally be that one site you turn to for the chaotic life of a 21st century family

 

Friends

CalendarFly is great for setting up parties, get-togethers or just hanging out. CalendarFly is better than email for setting up events because your friends will notice the event on their calendar, the one item in their life that carries their commitments and other events. Plan, change, talk, exchange, CalendarFly was built as a site that actually provides a new, mature, way for friends to communicate what's important online.

It's easy to get started.

 

The User Homepage

Your User Homepage always appears when you first log in. You can always return to it by clicking on the CalendarFly logo. The User Homepage has:

 

Your Personal Calendar in the main center section in monthly view. On the upper right, you have the ability to choose from three default views for this section - the monthly view, weekly view, or a list of upcoming events for the current week.

Just click on the one you want, and it will appear with the tab highlighted in orange. You can click on either of the other two views at any time.

 

On the monthly view, each little box represents an hour. The color of the box always matches the group color.

 

"My Schedule," on the left hand side of the screen, details the day's schedule. To modify or delete an event, just click on the colored bar of that event. To add an event, click on the hour (on the left) that is closest to when you want your event to begin (or click on the "Add Event" button).

 

"Recent Activity" is highlighted below - this enables you to see easily if there has been a change in your schedule.

 

On the right are the Groups you belong to and other features, such as your To Do List. The Groups section includes all the groups you belong to and shows you their color, which can be changed at any time. If the group is checked, as below, all events of that group show up on your calendar. If you un-check the group, they disappear from view. To bring them back, just click on the color box and the check mark will reappear and the events will appear on your calendar. You might, for example, want to see your school work but not your hockey practices.

To create a group, just click "Create a Group", in the "Groups" section, on the middle right. To join a group, in this beta version, click "Groups" in the top right personal information section.

Shortly, this function will become easier, with a privacy option so that the Group Administrator can control who joins the group.

Directly under the calendar, the user can find the event type selection boxes. These allow users the option to not view specific types of events, e.g., if a user has a good handle on homework but may forget tests, he can simply uncheck "homework" and it will not appear. Re-clicking on the box will bring the check mark and the homeworks back onto the calendar.

When a user clicks on a day, the day selected shows up in detail to the left, on the "Daily Schedule". It's easy from here to click on the event to get more detail about the event.

Selected Day

If you click on any day, that day will appear in orange on the monthly view and the selected day detail will appear on the left, in the "My Schedule" section. The current day will then be shown in blue, as below. To get back to the detail on the current day, just click the CalendarFly logo in the upper Left hand corner of your screen (or click on the current day).

Current Day

 

The Group Homepage

 

Most of the time, you only use your User Homepage. Group Leaders will use their Group Homepage to set up the Group, change Group information and to add files, e.g, an article you want the class to read or to create a discussion board on a topic. Uses of the Group Homepage will vary by teacher. You can get to any Group's Homepage by going to the "Groups" section in the middle right side of your User Homepage and clicking on that Group.

 

Clicking on that Group takes you to a page similar to your User Homepage, except the Group HomePage aggregates all the information related to that group - it does not have information from anyone's Personal Calendar. Also, on the Group Homepage, the right hand side now contains information specific to that Group, including Group information, links (resources), Group announcements, etc., as below The Recent Activity section is now on the right hand side. An important difference is the addition of the Group Forum. The Group Forum lets users participate in online discussions, with information flow controlled by the Group Leader. This makes it easy for a teacher to establish and monitor a discussion.

 

Creating an Event

Adding a personal or group event is easy on CalendarFly. While anyone can add an event to their own Homepage, only Group Leaders (and users specifically given group administration privileges) can add events to Group Homepages.

To add an event, just click the "Add Event" button at the top of the "My Schedule" box on the top left of the Users Homepage. Even faster, click on the day you would like to add the event on the monthly calendar, and click on the specific event time in the "My Schedule" area. This brings up a window allowing you to input event details with the correct time and date already filled out. Part of inputting the correct information includes "Add to Calendar" which enables you to choose the Group this event is for. Just click on the appropriate group. Group leaders may enter events for their groups from their Personal Calendars. Leaders may also enter events from the group homepage. Most students will only be able to add events to their own, personal calendars or to groups they have set up. Feel free to experiment with reoccurring events and changing the type of event.

 

The To-Do List

To make user's lives a little easier, we include a To-Do List, located on the bottom right of the User's Homepage. To add an item, click the "Add Task" Button on the bottom right. Once you have entered the information, click "Save" to add your task.

To change the order of your To-Do list, click and drag your item to its new order. The system will re-order your tasks once you have unclicked. To check off and remove an item, click the check box next to the To-Do list.

 

My Files

CalendarFly allows users to store up to a gigabyte of files on their Homepages. To add a file, click the "Upload File" button on the bottom right of the homepage. This will bring you to the "Upload File" page where a user can label and upload the file. To select the file to upload, click the "Browse" button, then label the file, and click the "Upload File" Button to upload.

 

Preferences

We recognize that people vary in their data display preferences, so CalendarFly has many customizable settings. All are accessed through the "Edit" Buttons located next to almost every section of CalendarFly (My Schedule, Personal Information, Groups, To Do, My Files)

By Clicking on the "Edit" Button in the Personal Information section of the Users Homepage, you can change personal information (First Name, Last Name, Email Address, City, State, Zip, Country, Time Zone, School Name), your Picture and your Password.

By Clicking on the "Edit" Button anywhere else, the user will see the "Options Page". The Options Page allows users to set preferences for the calendar, tasks and groups. The group preferences include changing group colors and un-joining a group. The To-Do List preferences include the ability to see or not see completed tasks. The Calendar preferences include the ability to set default start and end times for the "My Schedule" section of the homepage (for example, perhaps you never have appointments before 6 am or after 9 pm, you can have you're my Schedule display only those hours. Or, if you are on night shift and have many night appointments, you may choose to have those hours show on this page.)

 

Administration

You can "Report a Problem" to CalendarFly at any time. In the Users Menu section, right below the picture, click "Report a Problem". With this link, anyone may identify any issue and report it to CalendarFly staff.