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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.

Feb 18
Love1

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 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 blue “Save Rooms/Emails” button.

There are two options for doing this:

  1. If you plan to use these video meeting links more than once, it will be easiest to add them (once) to the “Teachers” page, and then press ‘Save Rooms/Emails’.
    If you add the video room URL to your teachers before you create your parents’ evening, no other steps are required.
    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.

    OR
  2. If this is a one-off task, after your parents’ evening has been set up, go to Dashboard > Options > Edit the Teachers > ‘Advanced Settings (Rooms, Minutes, etc) and insert the URL into the ‘Room’ field and press save.
Feb 18
Love1

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.

Dec 27
Love0

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…

Dec 01
Love1

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.

Nov 19
Love0

Video Meeting Troubleshooting

By News and Info

There are three main errors which may occur:

“Cannot access your device due to a hardware error”

This means the webcam/mic are not ‘available’ for your internet browser to use.

Potential solutions:

  1. If you did not ‘allow’ permission for your webcam or microphone to be used when prompted, you can use the blue ‘Video Settings’ button on this page to reset your preferences and allow you to approve these.
  2. If you’ve recently had a Teams/Zoom meeting, make sure these are closed (even try a CTRL+AT+Delete to close them, or a computer restart). You may need to try a different computer/smartphone/tablet if you can’t find the cause to this error.
  3. Lastly, make sure that the internet browser your are using does not have a webcam or mic icon in its website address bar which needs clicked on to ‘allow’ the browser to use your webcam/microphone.

If you do not have a webcam or microphone ‘installed’ on your computer, please use a different ‘device’ (computer, smartphone or tablet). Video meetings cannot take place without a webcam, or where you do not allow Parents Booking to use your webcam.

“The user did not give permission to access your media”

This often means the internet browser is blocking access to the webcam.

Potential solutions:

  1. Look at your internet browser’s web address bar and check if the video symbol is ‘blocked’. If it is, unblock and refresh the web page.
  2. Press the Video Settings button at the top of the video meeting page and Reset settings. This should give you another chance to approve your webcam and mic’s use by Parents Booking.

A grey box where you should be seeing yourself or the teacher, when the meeting should be taking place:

If your video meeting’s video area is still a grey box, even after your video meeting should have started, this means your computer is not able to connect to the video meeting.

When your video meeting starts, you should be able to see yourself (like a mirror) at least. If this is not the case, and you’re just seeing a grey box, there’s a problem connecting to our video server. This is most likely caused by your internet connection (home or work network) or, perhaps more likely, your firewall ‘blocking’ you joining the video meeting. It could also be your choice of internet browser, or some security settings on your device, but those are less likely.

Potential solutions:

  1. Most likely situation: Your internet connection is blocking the video meeting, possibly because of your home or work firewall. If you think your firewall is strict, and this could be the reason, try using a device which will allow you to connect to the internet outside of your firewall, e.g. using 3G or 4G mobile data, to see if there’s a difference, and if so you know it’s your internet/network connection/firewall.
    1. You could also try running the Twilio Network Test, which does take a moment or two. You can afford one of the top two items to fail, but not both. Similarly, you can afford one of the bottom two tests to fail, but not both. If 3 or 4 of these top two and bottom two tests are failing, it is a network/firewall issue, and the only solutions will be to NOT use the internet connection you’re on currently, or try to unblock your firewall if you feel confident in trying to do so. You’ll need to whitelist “twilio.com”, and allow the moist local IPs to you found here, e.g. Irish and German IPs if you’re in the UK or Europe, and USA IPs if you’re in America.
  2. Your computer has some other sort of issue stopping it connecting (in which case we would recommend you try a different device, e.g. smartphone, tablet, computer).
  3. Least likely situation: Use a different internet browser. E.g. Try Chrome instead of Edge, or vice-versa. Its possible you are using an internet browser that is incompatible (or might need ‘updated’)

Parent and/or teacher cannot hear each other

Potential solutions:

Sometimes the microphones on laptops / computers can be in “mute” mode. Hopefully this can be rectified via a setting in the internet browser (near the address bar?), and this is sometimes ONLY found when looking via “Classic control panel” could this be seen:

Steps:

  • search cpanel
  • find sound
  • go to recording tab
  • right click view properties of device
  • then go to “levels” tab and the button was on mute.
Parent's Video Meeting Guide
Teacher's Video Meeting Guide
Run a Network Test
Oct 29
Love1

Creating a .CSV file to upload your school’s pupils, parents and classes

By News and Info

Schools who use MIS/SIS databases that do not integrate with Parents Booking can create a custom .CSV file that can be uploaded. This blog post features instructions on how to create your own .CSV upload.

This two-spreadsheet approach involves linking two spreadsheets using pupil, parent and teacher IDs.

Spreadsheet 1 lists all of the pupils and parents, while spreadsheet 2 links the students to their classes and creates the teachers’ accounts (using the student ID number to link both spreadsheets).

To begin with, please download our spreadsheet 1 template and our spreadsheet 2 template. These are vital to your success.

The data fields required for spreadsheet 1 are:

 

  • Student ID
  • Student Forename
  • Student Surname
  • Student Name (this field is [forename] + [surname] typically. Do not use commas.)
  • Student Date of Birth
  • Student Registration Group or Year Group
  • Parent ID
  • Parent/carer Title
  • Parent/carer Forename
  • Parent/carer Surname
  • Parent/carer Mobile/Telephone
  • Parent/carer Email
  • Emergency Priority Number (schools usually denote a ‘Main Contact’ as priority 1, and lower priority parents as 2, 3, 4, etc. If you are uploading multiple parents for a student, you will see in our spreadsheet example that you do this by adding each parent to a new line, with the same student details on each row. Giving one of the parents priority 1 in this column will help us understand who the ‘main contact’ is).
  • Receives Email? (Set everyone to “TRUE” in this column unless you have some parents who do not wish to be contacted by email, in which case set them to “FALSE”).

You can list a pupil on two different rows to link them to 2nd parent/carer.

Rules: Do not extract parent/carers who do not have “parental responsibility” / legal rights.

Save this spreadsheet as a .CSV file (in UTF-8 Format if possible) by going to File > Save As.. and underneath the file name choose “.CSV UTF-8 (Comma Delimited)”.

The data fields required for spreadsheet 2 are:

 

  • Student ID
  • Teacher ID
  • Teacher Title
  • Teacher Forename
  • Teacher Surname
  • Teacher’s Email Address
  • Subject Name
  • Class Code

Again, save this spreadsheet as a .CSV file (in UTF-8 Format if possible) by going to File > Save As.. and underneath the file name choose “.CSV UTF-8 (Comma Delimited)”.

These spreadsheets are then uploaded in the following order:

 

  1. Spreadsheet 1 – Pupils and Parents
  2. Spreadsheet 2 – Classes
Oct 11
Love1

Asking for parent phone numbers, for telephone meetings

By Software Updates No Comments

If you would like to use Parents Booking to help facilitate telephone meetings, in the place of ‘in-person’ meetings, or video meetings, we can help.

In the Admin Area, go to: Set Up School > Parent Login Method. On this page tick “Mobile Phone”.

This will activate a new field on the parent login page which asks for the parent’s mobile number. The mobile number input by the parent will then show on the teachers’ appointment schedule. Et voila!

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