The Must Join Calendar Group!

A lot of us have been talking about how we keep up with all of the free things going on. Well, I have a suggestion.

I was tinkering with this idea today, and came across some groups over at upcoming.org — Namely the edublogger community group set up by John Pederson. (There is also an education group.)

How do I follow these events with RSS?

We can use our RSS readers to follow it.

Here is my suggestion for your RSS Reader:

• This RSS feed shows the newly added events to the edublogger calendar.
• This feed gives you an ical format that most RSS readers have to tell you what is happening this week.

Although I don't recommend this for individual school events (I use RSS calendar or airset for that.) It is a pretty robust platform that can let us share for conferences, etc.

I get so frustrated when I hear about conferences but there is no link and I have no background – I don't know where they are, what they are doing and how it relates to me. Doing some things like this will help us all spread the word about the great free resources. I've added David Warlick's fireside chat for next week as an event.

What do we do?
Now, here is what we can do — although the disadvantage is that you have to select a geographic location — the advantage is that you can view all calendar events that folks post in there — and add the badges to your website. (Let's Ask Yahoo for an online online location!)

You can create a badge that will automatically show all of the upcoming events in a group. (See the edublogger group below.)

Or you can create a badge showing what you will attend:

***NOTE***** OK, it looks like the CSS style sheets in the above badges are messed up and the badges aren't working — but I'll hack at it and get back to you.****

Now, I love airset, however, I also believe that you should join in where critical mass is building. John Pederson founded this group, but I found it by accident – I doubt he even knows I'm making this post.

We need to think of ways to make it easier to share and bring others on board.

Now, this makes it even more interesting. For you conference junkies out there, you can go to www.4info.net and subscribe to everything on upcoming.com tagged education — or if we can come up with another tag — like for example, the one I'm using education_event — then you can have texted to your cell phone every day — everything tagged education_conference. (My son uses this to keep up with GA Tech Football score changes — I use it for weather.)

4info doesn't yet have the ability to text you information from a group — but perhaps one day it will.

The point is — sharing, making it easier. Someone could also pull this rss feed and post these events to twitter I suppose.

Sharing, learning. Saving time. Any other ideas? Any other calendars out there more popular than this one?

tag: upcoming, yahoo, network, education, learning, education_event, John Pederson, calendar, Airset