Software Updates

New for July 2021, emails from Parents Booking will now be sent from the domain name @parents-booking.co.uk rather than @netmedia.co.uk

This is a simple change, but a nice one.

Parents, Teachers and school Admins have been being sent emails from our parent company’s email address for about a decade, and it occurred to us that this was not very helpful when it comes to recognising whether the emails are legitimate or not – after all, @netmedia.co.uk is not that familiar a domain name. So, going forwards, all emails will come from noreply@parents-booking.co.uk, whether they’re booking invites, reminders, confirmations, cancellations, password resets or even your annual invoice.

We hope this helps.

There is just one thing to be aware of: If your school was previously having to “whitelist” @netmedia.co.uk so that your school’s teachers could receive their password resets (or if emails suddenly stop being sent to teachers), you will likely need to ask the IT team to do the same with @parents-booking.co.uk (and @eu-west-1.amazonses.com, because we use Amazon AWS’ EU servers to send out our emails), which is why we will write to all customers to make this point. We have already noticed that schools using LGFL mail are experiencing this, and we’d like to ensure this won’t be an issue next term.

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/

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:

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 admin area (of Parents Booking) via the Teachers page, and these URLs will then be shown to parents as part of their print, e-mail or web-page confirmation when parents’ evenings are created (or by pressing ‘Update’ on the Dashboard > Options > Edit the Teachers page, to import these ‘video room’ URLs into previously set up parents’ evenings).

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.