Music Teacher's Helper - Your music studio manager

Google Calendar Syncing Now Available

Thu July 30th, 2009 by Brandon Pearce

If you have a Google account, you can now sync your Music Teacher’s Helper calendar to your Google Calendar! This allows you to take advantage of some of the great options that Google provides, such as:

  • See your personal, studio, and other events on the same calendar.
  • Sync your calendar with other calendars such as Outlook or iCal.
  • Sync your calendar with mobile devices, such as the iPhone or Blackberry.
  • Place your calendar on a remote website, such as your Music Teacher’s Helper website.

To setup Google Calendar Syncing, log into your Music Teacher’s Helper account, and go to Calendar -> Calendar Sync.

This feature is still in Beta, but we welcome you to try it out and help us make it as useful as possible for you. We’ve already found a few improvements we need to make regarding speed and time zone issues. We’re working on these and other improvements right now. We also plan to improve this Sync option in other ways, such as allowing you to create events from within Google Calendar, and have them transmitted to your Music Teacher’s Helper calendar. This should be ready shortly as well. If you have comments, questions, or suggestions about this new calendar sync feature, you can send them to our fantastic support team.

Thank you for your great feedback and support. We look forward to continue providing you with all the tools you need to run your studio effectively. Enjoy!

*** UPDATE July 31, 2009: We’ve now made significant speed improvements to the calendar. It copies events over 100 times faster, and there should no longer be the significant lag that we had before. We’ve also added a “purge” button on the Sync settings page allowing you to clear our your calendar and re-sync if there were events that weren’t copied on the initial sync (another bug we’ve fixed). We’re still working on the time zone bug (events showing at the the wrong time), but should have it fixed in the next day or two. In the mean time, you can add an additional time zone to your Google calendar that matches the time the events should be, so there’s no confusion. To do this, click the “Settings” link at the top of Google Calendar, and on the General tab, click the button to add an additional time zone. You’ll able to remove this extra time zone in Google whenever you want, and will probably want to do so once we fix the time zone issue. Thanks for your patience and feedback.
*** UPDATE: August 1, 2009: We have now fixed the time zone issue, for Google Calendar users in the USA. If you have a lot of events on your Google calendar that are set at the wrong time, you may want to simply purge your Google calendar (MTH can do this for you from the Calendar -> Sync page), then save your Sync settings again, and it will re-copy all your events to Google in the correct time zone. (Assuming your time zone is set properly in Home -> Preferences). Enjoy using the calendar!
*** UPDATE: August 7, 2009: It looks like the Google calendar sync is working great for most teachers. We have had a few teachers say it’s not working, but we found that they were putting just a username in the Google username box, instead of the entire Google e-mail address. If you use the full e-mail address, it should allow the events to purge and re-sync properly. Also, there was some confusion as to syncing of events from Google to MTH. The Google -> MTH sync functionality has not yet been completed. This is a feature we will launch shortly. At this time, the sync is only one way (MTH -> Google). Thank you.

Posted in Site Announcements |

About the Author

Brandon Pearce

Brandon Pearce is a piano teacher, choral director, computer programmer, and entrepreneur from Murray, Utah, and is also the creator of Music Teacher's Helper.

As his teaching studio grew, he found it increasingly difficult to keep track of how much each student owed. Having recently received a B.S. in Computer Science from Weber State University, he decided to write a web-based computer program to manage billing and scheduling in his studio. Realizing that he wasn't alone in his studio management frustrations, he soon made the service available to other teachers. And they loved it! Since 2003, several additional programmers, and thousands of teachers from around the world have participated in creating the world-class studio management software you know today as Music Teacher's Helper.

Brandon currently spends his time managing and improving Music Teacher's Helper, traveling with his family, and writing hymn arrangements for piano. He is also the assistant director of the Oratorio Society of Utah, a 90+ year old choral organization that performs Handle's Messiah each year, as well as other choral masterworks.

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5 Comments (Add Comment)

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  1. Thank you so much for this. I have lived off my calendar on the computer and syncing that to both PDAs and now the iPhone for years. The ability to finally tie in the MTH calendar with all of that it is major for me.

    For others trying to sync Google with iCal, I'm currently toying with two options. On one machine I have Busy Sync pulling the google calendar. On the other, I don't have Busy Sync, so I'm trying to subscribe from iCal. The Busy Sync calendar pushes to my iPhone nicely with Mobile Me, but I ran into some problems with the one that was just subscribed to in iCal.

    How are you using you Google calendar?

    by violajack — Sat Aug 1, 2009 @ 10:15 am

  2. I can't get any of my existing events to sync with Google. New events will sync with google, but won't push from there to my iphone.

    If I post a new event directly on google calendar it will sync with my iphone just fine. So everything seems to be set up correctly. I'm at a loss.

    by Ron — Sat Aug 1, 2009 @ 11:25 am

  3. Update: My entire mth calendar is now syncing beautifully with Google calendar. However I still can't get any of it to go to my i-phone. I even deleted the account and started again, nothing. I so need this to work!

    Anyone having or had a similar problem?

    Thanks,
    Ron

    by Ron — Sat Aug 1, 2009 @ 11:53 am

  4. Two things:
    My existing scheduling won't sync to GCal and my timetabling is done in 15 minute increments. GCal doesn't allow that, so until that problem is fixed, I won't be using it too much :(

    by Craig Tompkins — Sat Sep 5, 2009 @ 1:03 am

  5. If you're having trouble with syncing events, you can try "Purging" your calendar from the Calendar -> Sync menu. Please contact our support team if you continue having trouble.

    by Brandon Pearce — Sat Sep 5, 2009 @ 9:09 am

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