How to Calendar

For my Digital Civilization class at Brigham Young University we have what we call "Digital Literacy Labs" in which we choose or are assigned a certain lab (e.g. bookmarking or screencasting) and then go off on our own to not only learn the skill, but be able to apply it to our interactions with the digital world today.

My first lab is on Calendaring, of which I'm going to demonstrate as briefly as I can a few of the basics.
I chose to focus primarily on Google Calendar, which anyone with a Google account has access to. Just to learn the basic layout, I went to a website called lynda.com (which I learned about from a fellow classmate, thanks Eric!). I then began experimenting with creating events on my default calendar. I was able to enter my entire class schedule for this school year, including choosing which days of the week a class would repeat on and how long the week would repeat for.

Then I tried the "Quick Add" feature to see what it could do and was quite surprised when all I did was write "My Birthday September 21" into a blank and it then automatically found the date and put My Birthday as an all-day event that day.

A main function of online calendaring is to connect with others. To test this, I first moved my entire class schedule into its own new calendar and then went into Settings under My Calendars and used the Share a Calendar tab to send it to a friend. She in turn sent hers to me (it's also possible to simply enter a friend's email and if they have any public calendars it will automatically let you view it) and I could view both of ours side by side in either the week or days views. To top it all off, we then used the Find a Time feature to find a time for both of us to go to the Temple together (although that feature is more useful with more than two people since it's quite easy just to see what times are open). Here's the final product.

Calendaring is a very practical skill to have. It could be highly useful in business, educational, or even social settings. Occasionally, and possibly accidentally, people in the modern world use calendars as a form of journal writing. At home on our refrigerator we have a large family calendar. My younger sister is the main one who keeps it updated for us, but something I've noticed her doing multiple times is writing in events after they happen. It was hard for me to understand why at the time but now that I think back on it, it was before she began to regularly keep a journal, and I've even found old calendars lying around in the garage. I wonder if this has evolved over time along with the skills of reading and writing, or if this is a fairly new phenomenon.