Calendars and Google Classroom

[kaned]

I had a user come down today and showed me that they had about 100 Google calendars, most all of them were created from Google Classroom.

My question is, why when a Google Classroom is archived, does it not archive the calendar?  Is there a way to manage this?  Does someone have a good way to clean this up for their teachers using GAM?

[zdanenyc]

We haven't gone through GAM for that but staff has manually removed the calendar if they didn't like it. Once archived, the calendars typically are "unchecked" so that's been helpful to keep things "clean". It's not exactly what you're thinking but I hope that it helps a bit.

[kaned]

I was hoping to run an export of archived classrooms in GAM and somehow correlate that with calendars to delete them...

Honestly I haven't had time to look into this yet, I was just curious to hear back from others and how they might deal with this situation before I dedicate some time on this.

[Josh]

I agree it is not a good user experience when the calendars accumulate each year.

I acknowledge and as already pointed out, users can simply unsubscribe or hide the calendars themselves. In an ideal world this would be enough but I don't think it is reasonable for all staff/students to have to do that for all Google Classrooms they were ever a member of.

I haven't used GAM but it would be possible as the APIs do exist. I have done it with the PSGSuite PowerShell module before.

Some rough pointers for you:

• The calendar IDs are returned with each course object from the Classroom API.
• You can get the list of calendar subscriptions for each user, one at a time using the Calendar API.
• Where a subscription is found for one of the calendars you remove it for each user, one at a time, using the Calendar API.

@Kristal or other Googles, can this feedback be provided to the Google Classroom team?

[kaned]

Thanks @Josh

I may play a bit when I get time to investigate a good method to identify google classrooms from previous years (Created date, etc).  It's probably doable, I didn't even know this was a thing until a user came down with 50+ calendars from Google Classroom.

[Josh]

This might help you out. If you are using GAM or similar, among the properties returned by the Classroom API for each classroom are:

• courseState  - active/archived
• updateTime - In my experience this shows the last time the class was modified, work was posted or marked.