One lesson calendar, synced everywhere

You've had to reschedule a lesson this week to a different day. A parent messages the night before: "What time is the lesson again? We forgot." You've told them before, in an email and text. But inevitably, every time you reschedule a lesson, you're the one who has to remember to say so, and say it again, to every family it affects.

I built calendar syncing into Octavia because I was tired of double-handling this kind of work. Your lesson calendar already exists and is already accurate. It shouldn't need a second, manual channel just to tell people what's in it.

What it actually does

Octavia can export your calendar as a live ICS feed, the same format Apple Calendar and Google Calendar use for any subscribed calendar. Once you subscribe, your lessons, performances, exams, and other studio events show up inside your own phone or laptop calendar, next to everything else you've already got booked in. When something changes in Octavia, the feed updates, and your calendar app picks it up on its next refresh.

Families get the same thing on their side. From the Family Hub, parents and students can subscribe to their own calendar in Apple Calendar or Google Calendar. Parents see every child currently linked to them at that school. Students see their own lessons. It's the same ICS feed mechanism, scoped to what that person is meant to see.

How to set it up

For your own calendar:

1. Open Your Calendar and select Subscribe to this calendar.

2. Select Create subscription link.

3. Open it directly in Apple Calendar, or copy the link and paste it into Google Calendar's Add by URL page.

For families, from the Family Hub:

1. Open Calendar and select Subscribe.

2. Select Create subscription link.

3. Same choice: open in Apple Calendar, or copy the link into Google Calendar.

Each subscription is tied to one school. A student or parent connected to more than one Octavia studio subscribes separately for each one, so the two don't get mixed together in the same external calendar.

If you ever need a new link, Renew replaces the old one and switches it off immediately. Disable turns the subscription off without replacing it.

Why it's worth doing

The feed is one-way and read-only. Nobody can edit a lesson from inside Apple Calendar or Google Calendar; the subscription only ever displays what's already true in Octavia. That's deliberate. You keep one accurate record in Octavia, and the subscription is just a window onto it, not a second place things can be changed.

It's also private per person. A parent's link only shows their own children. A teacher's link only shows their own calendar. Nobody else can see it unless you hand them the link directly, which is worth treating like a password rather than something to post publicly.

And it removes the manual step entirely. You don't need to remind families about a reschedule after the initial conversation. It's already sitting in their calendar app for them to check, at the correct local time even if they're travelling, because Octavia sends the time in a format their calendar converts automatically. And it will obey whatever notification settings they have set up in their calendar, so they can have their calendar alert them 15, 30 or 60 minutes prior to the lesson if they need a reminder.

If you haven't turned this on for yourself yet, it's worth doing it before you tell your families about theirs. Once your own calendar is subscribed and you can see it updating in real time, it's an easy second step to say to a parent: this is worth the minute it takes to set up.