Welcome to the I Teach Ag Blog

I am an administrator and teacher in a small rural school in the Central Valley of California, Le Grand High School. I teach Introduction to Agriculture Science and Agricultural Communications. I am the local FFA Advisor, Agriculture Department Head, & Technology Coordinator for the district. Currently I am also the Central Region California Agricultural Teachers’ Association Secretary. I think of myself as a life-long learner and have a passion for my family, technology & gadgets, and teaching others.  I hope you enjoy my posts and please feel free to leave a comment.

Links to Me:
http://iteachag.com
http://iteachag.wordpress.com
http://twitter.com/iteachag
http://www.diigo.com/user/iteachag

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Google Teacher Academy Video Application Washington D.C. 09

Google Calendar to Twitter – How to get the most out of your Google Calendar

When I created our new school website over the summer one of the goals I had was to communicate with our audience in as many ways as possible. We now have news articles on the home page and we have an embedded Google Calendar. I also set up a page for the daily bulletin in written and video form as well as an RSS feed from two of our school Twitter accounts (LGHSCalendar & LGHSCafe) on the bulletin page, one to tell you coming events and the other to tell you the cafeteria menu for the day.

Communication in many forms was the primary goal, however a secondary goal was ease of maintenance.  I did not want to personally tweet the cafeteria menu daily or the daily events.  Automation was the key, but how?  I decided the easiest solution was to find a way to send our daily reminders from our Google Calendar of school events and cafeteria schedule to Twitter.  How to do this was the problem.  I tried SMS-to-SMS and even RSS-to-SMS but could not get the accounts to talk to one another. The answer was TwitterMail.com.  With this free service I was able to have Google Calendar send out an email reminder of an event to TwitterMail, TwitterMail in return would then post that reminder as a Tweet on our Twitter accounts.  The only thing I need to do is keep the calendar up to date.  As an added bonus Twitter has an RSS feed for an account profile, meaning that I can use that feed with an RSS reader gadget to post it dynamically on our website.

Again, communication was my goal and I was able to accomplish a big portion with a couple of calendars that were created already. Using these existing calendars we now are able to communicate in many ways with our audience.

Several people have asked me how I was able to set this up.  I decided to create a screen capture of the process to help them out.

This is the step-by-step version with instructions.

This is a quick animoto version.