- Student sign up time slots for stations or events I have used Google Forms (plus the choice eliminator add on), Sign Up Genius, Doodle, and many others. While each of these stand alone websites or extensions are useful, they don't integrate easily with your already existing Google calendar.
- Doodle is a scheduling platform you can use to suggest available times, invite participants to vote, and pick a final time per participants' responses. Start by setting up and customizing your meeting request, including potential time slots and meeting duration. Then, send the link to participants, who will indicate their.
- It's definitely more useful for one of the following: 1) a single event where people can sign up for different jobs and time slots to volunteer or work, or 2) a continuous calendar of signups for things like intake meetings, routine overtime tasks workers can opt to work, etc.
It's no secret in education that a critical component of being a successful educator is providing opportunities for direct interactions between students and faculty. From allowing students to clarify their understanding of difficult concepts to resolving important questions on the course structure, making faculty available to students is important in addressing individual learning needs. Sometimes just five or 10 minutes of one-on-one interaction can transform the educational experience.
Click here for help and resources related to general information about Doodle and your free Doodle account.
Doodle Sign Up For Time Slot Demonstration
Office hours play a key role in ensuring student success. But as students and educators know, scheduling office hours isn't always a smooth process. From difficulties arranging individual appointment times to the long wait times associated with drop-in style sessions, the office hour experience is often not a positive one. And while the importance of providing opportunities for student contact may be greater now more than ever – large remote classes can often be an impersonal experience – the challenges of scheduling appointment slots have only increased. Gone are the days of paper signup sheets. The long lines that used to stretch around corridors have now transitioned to long email chains.
The process of arranging office hours need not be a challenging one, though. As a university lecturer who believes in the importance of making it easy for students to meet with faculty, I can vouch that Doodle is possibly the simplest way of setting up office hours.
As illustrated below, you can create signup slots within five minutes, saving you time and making the whole process much more inviting for students.
Understanding Doodle Bookable Calendar slots
The real strength of using Doodle to help arrange office hours is its simplicity and flexibility. Doodle's straightforward approach for creating Bookable Calendar slots is perfect for even the most technically adverse, with customization options that work for educators of all levels. Plus, the intuitive sign-up process makes it inviting and simple for students to complete.
Step 1: Connecting your calendar
One of the many advantages of using Doodle Bookable Calendar slots is its ability to integrate directly with both Google Calendar and Office 365. Scheduled meetings booked with Doodle will integrate directly with your primary calendar, and any other meetings you enter in your calendar will sync with Doodle, automatically preventing that time from being reserved by students.
Step 2: Creating a Bookable Calendar
After you have connected your external calendar, you can start entering the basic information of your office hours. This includes:
- Calendar Title: A way of making it clear to your students that they are signing up for the correct calendar
- Customizable Link: A link that you can share with your students by email or on your course wall. This is customizable, again helping to make clear to your students what the link is for.
- Description: This can be useful in adding further instructions, for example, directing your students to sign up for one meeting slot.
- Location: For in-person office hours, this can be used to remind students of your office location. For online office hours, this box can be used to add in the link to your online meeting room. If you are using Zoom, Doodle has further options available to create an individual meeting link for each meeting, so you can leave this box blank.
Step 3: Setting available meeting times
The next stage in configuring your office hours is to block off the periods when you will be available to meet with students. This helps you ensure that the meeting times work for you and avoids the possibility of student meetings encroaching on your entire week. While the time slots conveniently carry over week to week, if there is a week that you are unavailable for a specific block of time, you can simply create an event in your connected calendar, mark it as ‘busy' and those times will automatically be removed from the Bookable Calendar on Doodle.
Doodle also detects the user's location, so while the meeting times that you create are all in your time zone, any student located in a different part of the world will see the available meeting slots in their local time.
Step 4: Defining meeting details
The Bookable Calendar meeting slots created in Doodle are customizable in the following ways.
- Meeting Length: Specify how long you want meetings to last. If you want more than one meeting length (for example, 15 minutes for office hour slots, but one-hour slots for group meetings), just create two separate Bookable Calendars. Since the separate calendars all sync with your main calendar, if a meeting is booked on one, that time option will automatically be removed from the other Bookable Calendar.
- Future Horizon: The future horizon option is a great way of restricting how far in advance students can book appointments. For example, you are able to restrict sign ups to only the next two weeks. This gives you the flexibility to make other commitments, without having to worry that a student may have already booked that time with you far in advance.
- Minimum Notice: Another great feature to help you stay in control of your calendar is the ability to set a minimum notice period. By ensuring that students must sign up a specific amount of time in advance, you can structure your day accordingly, without having to worry if suddenly you will get a last minute flurry of students signing up to meet.
- Buffer Time: Meeting back-to-back with students can be tiring. So it can be useful to factor in a buffer time between meetings to allow some time to regroup or to simply take a quick break. All you have to do is select the buffer time you want between each meeting slot.
Step 5: Adding in custom questions
The final step in configuring your office hours, and one that can help ensure that your office hour meetings go much smoother, is to collect additional information from students. For example, asking in advance what the students want to discuss can help you to prepare ahead of time, taking off the pressure on the day. If you teach multiple classes or sections, it can also be useful to collect this information, avoiding the need for you to look these details up.
Step 6: Previewing available slots
At this point, you're all done setting up the Bookable Calendar for your office hours and can preview how the meeting will look when students are signing up.
Students can sign up directly from the link without needing to create an account and will receive a confirmation of the booking by email. The appointment will also automatically sync with your main calendar, helping to alleviate any danger of forgetting the appointment.
Students also have the ability to directly reschedule a meeting from their confirmation email, saving you the time of having to coordinate an alternative date.
A few minutes later…the headache of scheduling your office hour slots is solved
Doodle is one of the easiest ways of scheduling student office hours. As illustrated above, it only takes one to two minutes to create a Bookable Calendar link that can be shared with students, enabling you to schedule office hour appointments with minimal oversight.
The versatility of the meeting scheduling options available in Doodle means that once you've experienced the power of scheduling with Doodle, you may find yourself using it beyond just booking office hours to arrange all your other meetings. You'll never want to go back to manually scheduling meetings via email again.
To learn how to leverage the features of Doodle to improve your education meetings, check out 'The Educator's Meeting Playbook.'
I schedule many, many events. When you're trying to line up six panelists for a podcast, email quickly becomes unwieldy, which is when I turn to Doodle, a Web service that allows you to poll people about their availability and figure out which time works best for as many people as possible.
For event organizers, starting a Doodle poll involves opening its Web interface and clicking Schedule an Event. You can create a Doodle account for free, but you don't even need to do that in order to schedule an event or register your availability for someone else's. An account is merely a matter of convenience if you use Doodle frequently, letting you keep track of all your open polls, both as an administrator and a participant.
When creating an event, all you have to enter is a name — descriptions and locations are optional. You can pick days from a monthly calendar or choose more specific times from a detailed weekly calendar view. There's also a free text option if you don't want to lock your event down to specific dates — i.e. 'every other Monday.'
In today's far-flung virtual society, it's particularly helpful that Doodle offers support for time zones, letting you associate the times you offer with a particular time zone. That makes it much easier to wrangle participants from across the country or around the world. Also helpful is how the service gives you the option of adding as many time slots as you could reasonably want, as well as letting you copy your list of time slots from one day to the others, so you don't have to tediously duplicate all that info.
Doodle Sign Up For Time Slots
By default, invitees can mark whether they are available or not at a specific time; as an advanced option, you can allow people to choose an 'If Need Be' option. You can also limit participants to choosing only one time period, and close the poll after a certain number of people have entered their availability. In the latter case, it would at times be more convenient if you could specify closing the poll once a quorum of people have selected a time in common. Finally, you can create 'hidden' polls, in which the results are shown only to the administrator, not to other participants.
Doodle conducts most of its business by email, sending messages to the people you invite to the poll (or letting you send the link manually to anyone you want to participate). That's a plus, because email remains the lowest common denominator for electronic communication. The fact that participants don't have to sign up for Doodle in order to register their availability is also great, since it removes barriers to people actually filling out the poll.
The Web interface for Doodle is pretty good, if not the most attractive. As an administrator, I particularly like the efficient way it collapses time slots with fewer responses, highlighting the times that the most people have in common. Color coding of slots — green, yellow, red — makes it easy to see at a glance when people are available. As a participant, it's easy enough to click a link and fill out availability — I've used a Google Sheet for attendance tracking before, and it works well, but it takes far more setup than Doodledoes to get the same level of features and polish.
Doodle also has a free iOS app, and while it has recently been redesigned, I still have a few issues with it. First, there's no iPad native version; it's iPhone-only.
Second, I find the app's interface difficult to use at times. For example, when I loaded a poll that I had created, it showed me a long scrolling list of times but acted as though I hadn't filled it out — which I hadn't, since as the creator of the poll, I had only put down times that worked for me. While it also displayed the number of people who said they could make a certain time, it wasn't immediately obvious that tapping that number would show me who was available at that time — as opposed to anywhere else in that row, which marked my availability. There's no demarcation at all between those two tap areas. It's also hard to figure out at a glance who is available at the various times and comparethem. To its credit, the app does at least identify which times have the most people in common.
Doodle conducts most of its business by email, sending messages to the people you invite to the poll (or letting you send the link manually to anyone you want to participate). That's a plus, because email remains the lowest common denominator for electronic communication. The fact that participants don't have to sign up for Doodle in order to register their availability is also great, since it removes barriers to people actually filling out the poll.
The Web interface for Doodle is pretty good, if not the most attractive. As an administrator, I particularly like the efficient way it collapses time slots with fewer responses, highlighting the times that the most people have in common. Color coding of slots — green, yellow, red — makes it easy to see at a glance when people are available. As a participant, it's easy enough to click a link and fill out availability — I've used a Google Sheet for attendance tracking before, and it works well, but it takes far more setup than Doodledoes to get the same level of features and polish.
Doodle also has a free iOS app, and while it has recently been redesigned, I still have a few issues with it. First, there's no iPad native version; it's iPhone-only.
Second, I find the app's interface difficult to use at times. For example, when I loaded a poll that I had created, it showed me a long scrolling list of times but acted as though I hadn't filled it out — which I hadn't, since as the creator of the poll, I had only put down times that worked for me. While it also displayed the number of people who said they could make a certain time, it wasn't immediately obvious that tapping that number would show me who was available at that time — as opposed to anywhere else in that row, which marked my availability. There's no demarcation at all between those two tap areas. It's also hard to figure out at a glance who is available at the various times and comparethem. To its credit, the app does at least identify which times have the most people in common.
But my biggest frustration is also one of Doodle's smartest moves. So much of Doodle is free that you'd be excused for wondering how the company makes enough money to keep the service afloat. Though the service does have ads, Doodle also offers premium features, some of which are pretty niche: SSL encryption if you're concerned about the security of your poll, the option to request additional information (like postal address), and automatic reminders.
But the most attractive of the premium features, at least to me, is integration with your existing calendars from Google, Outlook, iCloud, and so on. This is particularly a big deal on the mobile app, because when I open a poll in it, I constantly need to flip back and forth between the Doodle app and my calendar to figure out if I'm available at the times listed. That integration will cost you $39 a year; businesses can also opt for an additional level of customization starting at $69 per year and rising depending on the number of premium users.
Overall, despite my gripes with the iPhone app, I find Doodle to be an invaluable scheduling tool. It turns what used to be a painful process of email lists, reply chains, and hair-pulling into something that is pretty much seamless. With such a low learning curve, it's entirely worthwhile to invest the time in setting it up. And if you can afford to pay for the premium level of calendar integration, doing so makes Doodle even better.
