I have 2 offices, which means that when someone makes an appointment with me, they need to be aware which office I’ll be meeting them at. My appointment provider (YouCanBook.Me) sends an appointment request to both myself and the person making the appointment, and I then update my copy with the location.
This then sends the location out to the person making the appointment. However what happens if that person isn’t used to appointment requests? Perhaps because they’re a college student, and haven’t experienced them yet? Typically they ignore them, or don’t notice the location line or change at all.
This semester I decided to try a new approach. When a person makes an appointment with me, it enters on my calendar with the prefix “Appointment: ” and then the person’s name. This means I can easily find my “self-set” appointments using Microsoft Power Automate (Flow). My goal was to have a script run every night at 8 PM that scans the next 24 hours of my calendar. If it finds an appointment set by someone, it emails them an automated reminder telling them where to meet me. It took me a couple of hours to get up and running, but is now working beautifully. Below is each step of my flow, and how to create it yourself.
The basic workflow in Power Automate – a Recurrence to run the script at a regular interval, a time zone conversion, querying my Outlook Calendar, and then email each appointment’s attendees.8:00 PM seemed like a good time to remind people about a meeting they had the next day, although you could easily run this the morning of if you wanted to, or before business ended the previous day, say at 4:30.Power Automate grabs events off my calendar in UTC, however I needed to get myself into Central Time for where I’m at in the U.S. I also needed to take the current time and add 24 hours to it, so that I could catch meetings between right now, and 24 hours from now. I used the Dynamic Content Expression Editor to use the addHours(utcNow(),24) line.Next we have to get the list of items. The Filter Query here does the magic – it’s using an ODATA filter for anything that starts with Appointment: (including the space after the colon). This means that it only catches appointments created with that prefix, which is what YouCanBookMe is set to do (Your personal settings may have a different prefix if you’ve changed it).Now that we have our appointments, we need to send an email to the required and optional attendees reminding them. We start by converting the Start Time, again from UTC to Central Time. We then load in an email that we can place the start time and location in.I’ve customized the email slightly in that I added myself in as a BCC (So I can point to it later and say “See, you got this email”). I also had to set the Importance to Normal, otherwise it will send as Low importance.
And that’s it. The script has been running for a few weeks now without issue, and hopefully it will cut down on my frustration this semester with individuals unaware of where on campus I’m meeting them!
One of my classes this semester requires me to track how often students speak in class, and evaluate each comment. I also have students leading discussion, and I need to be able to generate completed rubrics easily for them so they get my feedback.
I’ve found that I can keep track of all of this in an Excel Spreadsheet on my iPad Pro, and that I can also use Excel to generate individual rubrics and a class wide participation report.
Here’s an example workbook that you can download and modify, and some screenshots that explain how it works.
The Participation Tracker screen – as students participate, I type in their names in the Person column (Excel remembers names after awhile, so I only have to type the first few letters), and I make their rating in the Score column. I can also put any comments in that I might need later.A pivot table that summarizes the participations in class, gives me the average score and standard deviation.When a student is presenting, I make my rubric ratings in this spreadsheet page. I can make comments after each rating area, and also know which presentations are coming up next or refer back. I also have a last column that’s “private” to me – it doesn’t show up on the rubric, but is a great place to make notes about something a student said that I might want to put on a quiz or exam.The Rubric Report sheet – I simply change the number in the upper right to the row number I’d like to create a report for, and it populates the information into the Rubric. I can then take a screenshot of the rubric, and upload it to my LMS (Canvas) as a comment.
Hopefully you find the spreadsheet useful – I know I have in just the 2 weeks I’ve been using it. It’s saved me a lot of administrative work, enabling me to do more “fun” pedagogical stuff in class!
