Continuous formation

So… say you wanted to have a party… but what’s the right time to have it? Office365 Outlook (free for all teachers & students!) will let you poll people to decide when’s the right time to meet. You need to use Outlook-on-the-web though.  Now Outlook-on-the-web is actually a pretty good Outlook and has the same information that your Desktop Outlook has -- same mail, same calendar, just in a more web-active environment. Some of my faculty use Outlook-on-the-web as their main client because it's so powerful and has some nice options (like this polling feature!) Visit https://portal.office.com and click on the Calendar icon at the bottom of that page, or click on the CALENDAR button when visiting https://portal.office.com … or click on the Waffle & choose Calendar. So many different routes to get there -- it's always a great surprise to me when someone shows me a different way! When you click NEW you can then click POLL FOR A TIME TO MEET and create a poll for ...

As we continue to prepare for the coming academic year (we don't start classes until the week after Labour Day) I've begun to prepare the data for the Faculty. One of the introductions last year was the "Duty Calendar" -- who does residential duty each night, both faculty and prefects (student leaders).  In the past, it was stored in five different spreadsheets, one for each house and then one for the entire campus (since on weekends, faculty members are assigned to the campus rather than specific houses during the day Saturday & Sunday).  No one from other houses knew who was doing duty in any other house and if swaps were made, folks were never really sure that the change had been made.  Now, although the data starts out on a spreadsheet (I configure a spreadsheet for the House Directors) it is then copy-and-pasted into a Sharepoint Calendar.  3 clicks and 2 key-presses for each spreadsheet and the information is available to all. To be precise, it is paste...