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Will

Will manages the business on a day-to-day basis, responsible for a sales and demonstration team; operations and is the primary contact for pre-sales support.

Can I Add A Translator To My Teachers’ Video Meetings?

By Software Updates No Comments

Yes, you can.

Parents Booking customers can have 2+ teachers in their video meetings, and one of those ‘teachers’ can be a translator if you like.

Steps:
1. Take all your parents’ appointments like normal
2. After the boking deadline has passed and you know who the translator(s) will be, you can create them an account on the Teachers page. They don’t need any students added to them, they just need a name, subject/department (“Translator”) and email address, which they use to login.
3. Then, on the Manage Bookings page, you can go to each class teacher and tick the bookings you want the Translator to have, and use a new blue button at the top of the page called “Share Bookings” to share them with the translator. This adds the Translator to the parents’ evening and when they login they can join the booking the parent made with the teacher.

Related blog post and video about how to share video meetings with other teachers.
https://knowledge.parents-booking.com/multiple-teachers-same-video-meeting/

Sharing Existing Bookings, so that Multiple Teachers Can Join the Same Video Meetings

By Software Updates No Comments

Schools can share bookings that have previously been made with one teacher (let’s call them teacher A) with a second teacher (Teacher B). This is really simple to do, and the video and PDF below are both good instructions/resources explaining the process.

Steps:
1. You can share bookings that have already been made with a 2nd teacher at any time, but consider that it might be best to do this after the booking deadline has passed, so you only have to do it once and can do it for all bookings that require sharing.
2. Make sure the teacher you want to share the bookings with has an account on the Teachers page. If they don’t, add them. They don’t need any students added to them, but they do need a name, subject, department and e-mail address (so you can send them a username/password to login with).
3. Go to the Manage Bookings page, fine Teacher A, tick the bookings you want to share, then at the top of the page click Share Booking and share them with Teacher B. If Teacher B was not in the evening, they’ll be added.

Download PDF Instructions Here

Explainer Video:

Taking Bookings for COVID Testing in Parents Booking

By EdTech Discussion No Comments

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.

Add a Video Room URL to Parent Appointment Schedules

By Software Updates No Comments

Schools who prefer to use their own video meeting rooms, perhaps with Teams, Zoom or similar, can show the URL for the teachers ‘video rooms’ on parents’ appointment schedules, making it easy for parents to join their video appointments.

School administrators simply need to add URLs for these ‘video rooms’ to the Teachers page in the admin area of Parents Booking and press the “Save Rooms/Emails” button.

Steps:

Go to the Teachers page, paste the Teams/Zoom link into the Room field for each teacher, and press the Save Rooms/Email button in the Control Panel.

If you add the video room URL to your teachers before you create your parents’ evening, no other steps are required. The video meeting links will be shown on parent schedules.

BUT

If your parents’ evening has been created before you add these video room URLs to the Teachers page, you will see a red Notifications banner and you should click this and tick your parents’ evening and ‘Apply’ the changes, so that the parents’ evening knows about these video room URLs. Alternatively press the ‘Update’ button in Dashboard > Options > Edit the Teachers page.
You can check the the video meeting links have ‘imported’ into your parents’ evening by going to the ‘Advanced Settings (Rooms, Minutes, etc)’ button/page.

    Bulk-Add Breaks and Bulk-Extend Teacher Appointment Schedules

    By Software Updates No Comments

    One of the new features in Parents Booking’s most recent release allows administrators to add breaks and extend appointments for groups of teachers, at once, in just a few clicks. This saves the administrator from having to make these changes teacher-by-teacher, and it’s something both simple and effective that we’ve found schools have been looking for recently.

    Once you have a parents’ evening set up, find this functionality at: Dashboard > Options > Print, Email, Block Out and Extend Teachers > Mass Block/Extend.

    Video Call Testing/Settings

    By Software Updates No Comments

    With hundreds of schools, and tens of thousands of parents using Parents Booking for their parent-teacher meetings, and with these being video meetings very often, we’ve been adding new features to help parents and teachers test their “device” (laptop/PC, Mac, iPad/iPhone, Android), in the simplest way possible, before having their video meetings. The below video shows you how…

    Adding a gap / ‘buffer’ time between appointments

    By Software Updates No Comments

    One of the most-requested features this academic year, due to schools having video meetings in often multiple-hour sessions, has been to be able to add a small gap of time between appointments.

    This is now possible. Next time you create a parents’ evening you’ll notice a ‘buffer time’ feature. Simply use this to add a small gap between appointments.

    Re-Assigning Class Codes and Subjects to Other Teachers

    By Software Updates

    One of the more tricky tasks in Parents Booking used to be when you had to move a class code from one teacher to another.

    To make this as simple as possible, you can go to the Teachers page and, in the Control Panel, click the “Copy/Move Class Codes” wizard…

    This wizard will help you:

    1) select the teacher who has the class code(s) you want to change

    2) select which of their class codes you want to move/copy

    3) select the teacher who is receiving the class codes

    …And all you need to do after is decide if you are ‘moving’ the class code to the new teacher outright, or ‘copying’ the class code (which keeps it with the original teacher while adding it to the new teacher).

    Once you have completed the wizard, a red Notification banner will show, asking which parents’ evenings you want to apply these changes to. Use this to add the changes to the correct parents’ evenings.