Google Calendar Sync on iPad – Still Confusing, But Now With Fewer Steps!

Google has changed how you set up shared and subscribed calendars on the iPad. The process is less painful and fewer steps that used to be, but it’s still not obvious how to do it. You would think that you would need to make the changes in Settings –> Mail, Contacts & Calendars, but you need to head to Safari or another web browser on the iPad to make the changes once your account has been initiall set up in Mail, Contacts & Calendars.

The good news is that you no longer need to set up your school/hosted Google Apps address as an Exchange account to access multiple calendar synching, which had it’s own unique information and steps to follow that were also not common sense for most teachers.

Here’s a summary of the instructions from the Google Calendar Help pages.

1. If you have not done so, you’ll need to set up your school email on your iPad
   1. Head to the Settings app
   2. Click ‘Mail, Contacts and Calendars’ in the list on the left.
   3. Select ‘Add account…’ and choose Gmail from the list
   4. Follow the steps from there, making sure that the ‘Calendars’ selector is on.
2. Now, in Safari (or other browser on the iPad) head to the proper page for your district listed below:
   1. Beaver: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/beaver.k12.ut.us/iphoneselect
   2. Kane: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/kane.k12.ut.us/iphoneselect
   3. Garfield: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/garfk12.org/iphoneselect
   4. Iron: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/ironmail.org/iphoneselect
   5. Millard: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/millardk12.org/iphoneselect
   6. Any other hosted domain: https://www.google.com/calendar/hosted/your_domain/iphoneselect (replace your_domain with whatever trails the @ in your email address)
   7. Regular Gmail account: https://www.google.com/calendar/syncselect
3. Log in if necessary
4. Check the boxes next to the calendar(s) that you would like to access on your device.
5. Click the ‘Save’ button on the bottom right.

Now, after a short syncing time, you’ll be able to access the selected calendars in the ‘Calendar’ app on your iPad. If you don’t love the Apple Calendar app, you might want to take a look at Calvetica. It’s what I use and I love it – much faster to enter events on the iPad and much easier to view other months.