How to Add a Google Calendar to Your Wikispace

All right. Today I’m going o teach you how to embed a Google calendar into your Wikispace using the embed widget tool within Wikispaces. As you can see, I’ve created one right here for school and the cool thing about it is that all of these entries right here are automatically entered. I don’t have to do a thing. And I’m going to each you how to do that as well, how to actually import in iCal calendar from the school that you attend or maybe it’s another calendar that’s been made public on the internet. But I’m going to teach you how to do all of that today. It sounds really hard but it’s not. And I’m going to show you how to do it. so, in order to do this on your Wikispace, you firs need to have a Gmail account. And once you do that, once you have a Gmail accont, you going to want to go to Google Calendar. To do that, you’re going to log in at Google.com/calendar. And when you get there, you’re going to go ahead and log in with your username and password. Your username is going to be your Gmail address. And once you logged in, it’s going to bring you to this page. It might actually bring you to either the week view or the day view. So I like looking at it at the month view. So I went ahead and changed it right there. So, the next question is, well, now that you have this calendar, mine’s filled up with date right here but now that you have this calendar that’s probably blank if you just created a new one, how do you import a calendar where you don’t have to update any of the dates on it? They’re jus automatically updated by whoever’s managing the calendar. Well, our school actually has an online calendar for parents to view and it is actually in iCal format. And so if you look up here on the web address bar, you can see a little RSS icon right here and it says subscribe to this page. So actually if I just clicked once in here and then copy this address that would actually be the iCal address. But I want to show you different ways as well which a way that you’ll see it is probably. But they have a thing here called Options and then I’m looking for the iCalendar format. So here it is iCalendar Subscription and I want to subscribe to this calendar. I don’t really need to fill in any username or password and that one include calendars and add-ons. So I’m going at and to click on Subscribe to this Calendar. Now it’s going to give me two options. I9 can either do the WebCal subscription which is actually the iCal format and that’s the format that we’re looking for or we can do a HTTP subscription. Since I’m teaching you in this tutorial how to import a calendar in to Google calendar in the iCal format, we’re just going to go with the WebCal subscription. Now, depending upon what website you’re on or what calendar you is actually grabbing this iCal information from, it could say anything from WebCal subscription to iCal subscription. So you need to be looking for those keywords. Either iCal or WebCal, those are the ones that Google calendar can accept. So, actually I’m not going to even click on this because if I do, it’s going to ask me what application I want to launch it with. And I don’t want to launch this in an application on my computer. I want to copy this iCal address and if we just simply hover over this link right here, that’s going to reveal the WebCal address on the iCal address. So I’m going to go ahead and copy that. To do that, you need to right click on the link, or if you’re on a Mac, you’re going to hold down Ctrl and then click. And then you’re going to look for a Copy Link location. And that’s what we want to press. So I went ahead and clicked on that. Every now and then you’ll see the calendar actually display the address and if we want it to, I could have just copied and pasted this as well. This is also the subscription address for the calendar that we’re wanting to import. All right. So we’ve got the address, copy. Now, we’re going to go back over to Google Calendar to add it in. and this is how we do it. Google calendar if you see that the left, you have a section called Other Calendars and at thee very bottom; there’s an option to add. You’re going to select the one that says “Add by URL”. Okay? we’ve copied the iCal address, we’re going to paste it in and make sure you check this right here because when we designed to imbed this calendar into our Wikispace, all the dates in the calendar actually is going to need to be made publicly available. Your Wikispace maybe a private Wikispace and that’s great. I mean even though you’re making this calendar publicly accessible, within your Wikispace it will still be private. So just keep that in mind. And we’re going to go ahead and click on Add. Okay. so now it’s been added. Now, here is the calendar that we just imported in. I actually already imported in but this is the Warner School Calendar. And if you noticed the dates that are reflected now in the Google calendar are the same ones on the actual online calendar that is viewable for all of our parents and anyone else who wants to check out. And let’s see what our schedule is like during the year. So, now, how do we imbed this calendar within our Wikispace? To do that, your’e first going to make sure that your calendar is selected right here and then you’re going to click on the drop down area to the right of it and you’re going to click on Calendar Setting okay? This is where we’re going to imbed the calendar right here. and if we wanted to, we could jus grab this code right here and copy it and then head over to the Wikispace and then copy it in using the imbed calendar tool. But this right here, it gives you some other options that are really nice that you may not actually need to have or display on your calendar for those who were viewing it. So right now we have Title. Okay, title I do want to keep the title that is actually Warner School Calendar. Navigation buttons? Yeah, I want to keep those too because I want people to be able to navigate between the months and see what’s coming and maybe what has already past. The date? Yes. We’re going to want to keep that as well because that displays the current month. Print Icon? Yeah, I like to keep that incase anyone wants to print. Tabs? That’s up to you. I don’t see a real need for it so I’m going to go ahead and leave those off. Calendar List? No. I don’t need to put that. I don’t need to list any other calendars that I like to imbed or display. Time Zone? Yes. I like to display that. I like showing the default view as the month so I’m going to go ahead and keep that. And I’m just going to go ahead and keep the width and height the same. Week is going to start on Sunday that’s fine and background color, I’m going to keep as white. I’m going to leave off a border. No need to add that in. and I think that’s it. So I’m going to go ahead and click on this right here, Update HTML and then we’re going to click and to select all of the code, right here you can click Ctrl+A on your keyboard if you’re on a PC, if you’re on a Mac, you’re going to hit Comman+A and then Ctrl+C to copy or Command+C and now we have the code. Now, we’re going to go and paste this within the Wikispace so let’s go ahead and do that now. Okay. Now, to paste this in, I’m going to go ahead and create a new page okay. to imbed this calendar, I’m going to go ahead and create a new page. To do that, I’m going to click on New Page and title it School Calendar and might add in some tags and then click on create. Okay, now the page has come up, I’m going to go ahead and delete this text. I don’t want anything in there right now. And then I’m going to click on the Embed Widget Tool and I’m going to click on calendar and I’m going to click on Google. Okay. We’ve already copied the code, this code right here. so we’re going to go ahead and paste it in by pressing Ctrl+V if you’re on a PC or Command+V on Mac. Click on Save. There it is right there but we also need to click Save again. And there it is. And notice my calendar is now filling the space of my Wikispace’s page without leaving much white space on the outside. And that’s good because then it’ll give you a lot more space for the actual events that you’re posting on you calendar. So that’s it. That’s how you can imbed a Google calendar into your Wikispace and also set it up to where if someone has already created and is managing a calendar that is in iCal format, your calendar can be updated automatically. I will not have to touch this calendar for then rest of the year because I know that the dates are going to be automatically displayed because someone is already entering in the dates for the calendar. So a great tool to use for your Wikispace. I hope this is helpful for you if you’re a school administrator or and educator. This will definitely come in handy and it will mean less work for you if you’re able to import a calendar in iCal format that someone is already managing. So that’s it. If you don’t mind sharing this so that other Wikispace users could see it and learn from it, I really appreciate it. Underneath this video, if you scroll down, you’ll see a Share It box and you can share it on Facebook, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Technorati and I believe there’s one more. I’m not actually looking at it right now. So thanks for watching. And to see more great Wikispace tutorials, visit wikispacetutorials.com