Will

We’ve been hard at work upgrading the Events and Clubs module this summer, and below are a list of the changes we’ve made so far:

• The capacity for events and clubs are now tied to the date, not the actual event, meaning where you run an event or club over multiple date ranges, with a capacity of 20 for example, this is the capacity per date now.
• In the school’s Admin Area > Set Up School > Preferences page, there is a new text field that allows the school Admin to determine a maximum number of clubs that a student can be registered for within one group/term. This will be perfect for schools who don’t want the first parents to login to be able to book more than their fair share of clubs.
• We have integrated with Stripe, meaning that it, ParentPay and PayPal are all ‘payment gateways’ that schools can configure to take payments online.
• We’ve added more currencies, so that schools who operate internationally should be able to take payments in their currency.
• Clubs and Events will very soon use the same Reg Class ‘selection’ interface as parents’ evenings, because we know from trials and feedback that this is much more popular than typing in the Reg Class names.
• Hopefully by 1st Sept we’ll have launched a new type of Club, which allows parents to select multiple dates. This will be perfect for wraparound care, breakfast clubs and after school clubs where parents can opt students in on selected dates, rather than all dates. An example of how this will look is below.

As ever, we’ve been hard at work over the summer, and in this case in particular we’ve been adding lots of nice new features to our video meeting module, to improve the parent and teacher experience so that meetings are even more immersive and helpful to all participants.

• If a parent is very early for their parents’ evening, a new notification explains this and a button shows where the ‘join appointments’ button will be shown (15mins before the first appointment starts)
• When you hang up during a meeting, you do not leave the meeting any more. You are held in the video meeting room until your next meeting starts.
• A countdown timer now shows how long until your next meeting starts, before or in-between meetings.
• Parents and teachers can see if the other meetings they will have are ‘online’ or not now. A red circle icon indicates the other participant is not in their video room at this moment in time, whereas a green circle icon indicates the other participant is in their video meeting room.
• Teachers can now click on a parent’s name, in their video meeting room’s appointment schedule, and expand more booking information, such as contact information and comments submitted by the parent.
• Parents can share a ‘join link’ that will allow other parents to join the booked video meetings in one click, without even the need for a parent login.
• Parents who have meetings ‘shared’ with them (by other family members) can now see these on their Dashboard > View my Booking Schedule page, and can choose to opt out of joining these from their Parent Dashboard > Make/Edit My Own Bookings page.
• The school Admin can define which region the video meetings take place in, in case this is required. See Admin Area > Set Up School > Preferences page.
• The school Admin can see not only which parents/guardians booked and attended their meetings, but also which extra parents/guardians attended, e.g. when the meeting was shared with them. See Reports tab’s List of Attendees and similar reports, on the day after the parents’ evening, for this data.

At the time of writing we intend to add the following within the next month as well:

• Screen sharing and a chat box in the video meeting room.
• Better error reporting, e.g. when a video meeting cannot connect we will explain as best we can to the parent/teacher what the issue is.
• When multiple users are in the video meeting room, we want to show you the person that is talking to you at all times, so we will code the “video area” to work this way.

Do you want to facilitate booking of COVID-19 tests by parents? If so, this is the blog post for you!

Steps:

1. Create some new teachers called “Slot 1”, “Slot 2”, or similar.
2. Edit each, then add the students who will be booked into the “slots” using the Add Students button. You’ll probably need to add each Reg Group individually.
3. Create a parents’ evening (with multiple dates?), ticking to include all the Reg Groups you added to the “Slots”. You may also want to set a booking limit so that parents can only book each student once (e.g. one per ‘slot’).
4. When the parents’ evening has been set up, go to Dashboard > Options > Edit the Teachers, and remove ALL teachers and subjects except your “Slots”.
5. You an test it works by going to Manage Booking > Login as a Parent
6. Lastly, send parents their invite like normal, and you can monitor the sign-ups from the Reports page.