Google Tasks and Calendar for Students and Teachers

Distance teaching and learning poses a variety of challenges. One of those challenges is staying on top of the seemingly endless stream of emails.  One way to help stay on top of email action items is to use Google Tasks. 

Google Tasks can be found in the side panel of Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Slides and Sheets. Tasks allows you to create quick, at-a-glance "to-do's" that can have time-based reminders. If you attach a time-based reminder, this task will also appear on your Calendar. 

An email message in Gmail can be turned into a task in Google Tasks. If you have action items or required work in an email, you can simply add that message to your Google Tasks to help you remember to complete the action. The series of screenshots below shows you how. 

The examples below are for a student. These processes will work the same for teachers. Each time a student gets an assignment or announcement in Google Classroom, an email is generated. Students can take that email, from Classroom, and it to Google Tasks to set a reminder to do the work.

Step 1: Open the email message and click the Add to Tasks button.

Step 2: After clicking the Add to Tasks button, the email message will appear in Google Tasks on the side panel. Click Edit (pencil button) to augment the task

Step 3: After clicking the Edit button, you edit the title, add details below, add a date/time reminder and set it to repeat if you want.

This is what it looks like with added details and a time/date reminder.

Step 4: Make sure Tasks is turned on Google Calendar. This will allow any task with a time/date reminder to appear in your Google Calendar.

This is what it will look like when Tasks is turned on Google Calendar.

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