Scheduling meetings
I’m guessing that I am the only one in this situation, but I find that I spend a LOT of time trying to coordinate people’s schedules. I have to propose several possible dates for each meeting that may involve: the teacher, the special education teacher, the Occupational Therapist, and the school psychologist. All that is before I can even contact the parent!
The email threads that I have to coordinate these meetings are often 18 emails long. They are overwhelming to say the least.
My co-worker found a awesome website called doodle.com. From this site, you can create a poll and nicely coordinate everyone’s schedule! And it’s free! And you can even synch it to your calendar for easy looking up of possible meeting times!
First you write down the event’s name:
Then you click on different times on the calendar that are “proposed times”. Since I linked my google calendar to the site, I can easily see what other things are going on and schedule around them.
Then add the email addresses of people you want to invite:
The email recipients will get a poll and they can click on the times and dates that work for them:
And this is the view that you get with the results:
Isn’t that awesome! Then I know the dates that work for different people and can finally call the parent.
Have you tried doodle.com before? Or do you have another great way to schedule large meetings?
This is totally awesome! I love my google calendar and this would make it so much easier to coordinate!
I’m going to try this. (I have been using http://www.meetingwizard.com which also polls for dates, but it doesn’t link to my google calendar…and there is an obscure (to me) last step in sending out the meeting invitation. If you forget this last step, you think you’ve sent the invite….Doodle sounds like it’s worth a try. Thanks for sharing!
That’s awesome! What a great idea. Sounds much easier than trying to coordinate one on one with so many different people. Thanks for passing that on!
Wow, this seems like a fantastic site!! Our school utilizes a calendar where everyone in the special ed department puts their scheduled meetings, so I actually don’t have too much difficulty because I can generally get a pretty good idea of availability based on that. However, the school I worked at last year had the same thing but half the people didn’t use it, so I would have loved to know about this back then. I’ll be bookmarking just in case. 🙂
-Miss Vee
This is really great! My school has one day a week devoted to special Ed meetings, so everyone is supposed to be available on that day. A ‘floating’ sub is hired to go from room to room to cover teachers. Any therapies that occur are supposed to be extra…when I first started in this district I thought it was so strange to not schedule kids for a whole day but in the end it makes things sooooo much easier! I’m in a really small district though so that probably helps! This site will be great for when a meeting has to occur at other times! Thanks for sharing!
I have used Doodle during grad school to schedule meetings. It seemed pretty nice to use. Our school district is encouraging us to use our Google calendar to schedule meetings. Since we are all on the same server, you can see any coworkers ‘busy’ or ‘free’ times. Looking forward to trying it out!