Music Teacher's Helper Now Offers Google Calendar Sync

Music Teacher's Helper, the most comprehensive way to manage your home music studio, just got a lot better. One of MTH's strongest features was the ability to connect a teacher's website to full studio management for both teacher and students, with the studio calendar fully integrated with invoicing and student accounts.

Until now, a teacher's schedule has been only viewable within the walled garden of the MTH site. That's about to change with the introduction of Google Calendar Sync for MTH accounts.

What does this mean?

When you schedule your studio events (ie. lessons, rehearsals, recitals) from within Music Teacher's Helper, that data can now sync to a Google Calendar, so your teaching schedule can be exported and used with many of Google Calendar's many uses and incarnations, including:

• using separate Google Calendars to link up the various parts of your full schedule, ie. studio schedule, personal schedule, to-do items, or national holidays.
• viewing your studio schedule on a Netvibes or iGoogle browser start page.
• viewing your schedule on the go via iPod, Android, or Blackberry device.
• sharing your schedule via either embedding it on your MTH website or sending the url to students.
• customizing reminders to be sent to you via email or SMS.

But most important of all, this feature now allows you to view your MTH studio schedule offline via Google Gears, Microsoft Outlook, iCal, or Sunbird. This is sure to be a huge time-saver for many teachers who need to schedule lessons quickly and without the constant need for an internet connection.

The sync feature is still in beta, so expect a bit of bumpiness at the outset while the kinks are sorted out. Technically, this is not a true two-way sync, since it can only export your studio events to Google Calendar (the events still need to be created within the functionality of MTH). According to Brandon Pearce's blog post yesterday, one of the projected features slated for future development is the ability to create events from within Google Calendar and import updates to your own studio calendar (and presumably types of events, locations, and dollar amounts) back on MTH. Stay tuned for more developments...