Helping students get txt reminders

I have often thought I’d like a system to txt students reminders of deadlines in online classes, but all the methods I’ve explored over the last half dozen years or so involved too much work on my part, collecting cell phone numbers and such. So I’m going to try this semester to let Google Calendar do the heavy lifting.

I put all my deadlines for each class into its own Google Calendar. This was relatively simple, since I could duplicate entries and move them easily. Since Google insists on both start and end times, I just made them within a minute: something due at midnight runs 11:59pm-12:00am, for example. It took me about 90 minutes to do three full classes.

I then followed the instructions at the Google Calendar page for letting people save all the events on a calendar. I wanted a button that students could click to load my calendar into theirs. Next to this button I put a link to instructions on how to get Google Calendar to send you txt message notifications. It looks like this, pasted into an HTML block in Moodle:

We’ll see if it works.

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