Tech Tip: Canvas Calendar

This is what my monthly planner looks like. At the beginning of the semester, I went and wrote down the events that showed up on my Canvas calendar onto this one.

(Source: Screenshot from my iPad, August 2018)

Although I have tried many times before, I do not think scheduling my life using electronic calendars like the Canvas calendar and Google Calendar is for me. I am often on the go and I usually only carry my iPad with me so I don't like to have to rely on being connected to wifi to be able to schedule things. I do love the feature of the Canvas calendar that shows when assignments are due, but this is usually only the case for things that have a dropbox deadline and many of my classes have presentations, online homework using others sites, and other work that we turn in class or outside of Canvas. It would be really awesome if all of my professors included all of those things on their Canvas calendar for the class, but I understand that it is a little bit of a hassle. I also take some online classes at OCCC and so I would not feel safe relying on just my Canvas calendar for class deadlines. I also love the feature on both Canvas and Google calendars that allows you to write your own dates in and allows you to control which events that you want to look at depending on if you have everything sorted out by class or work/school/family/etc.

I am SO blessed to have an iPad so I use it for almost all of my schoolwork, as well as a personal planner. I like to download templates off of the internet and import them onto an app called Goodnotes and create a paperless planner. I love the flexibility of this because having a paper planner would mean one more thing for me to carry around in my bag and this planner is very easy for me to change stuff that I wrote and import other files in that have to do with planning my semester like the syllabi from all of my classes. If I did not have my iPad, I would definitely just print the same templates out (monthly calendars and weekly planning pages to write down M-F obligations and due dates) and stick them in a binder and folder to always have them with me. The actual act of writing down the events is very important to me because I am less likely to forget that they will happen and there is nothing more satisfying that erasing a deadline from my calendar when I get done early. The downsides of my method of planning vs. Google calendar is that I can't collaborate with others and I can't directly set up reminders for each event, but that is okay because enough people in my life do not use Google calendars for me to collaborate with them and I just set reminders for important dates on my iPhone Reminders app!