Software Updates

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 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.

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.

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…

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.

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!

Welcome back!

We have spent the last six months building lots of exciting new features for Parents Booking (which, as you may know, is our new name).

To help explain these changes, this blog article covers them all. You can click on a topic and more information will be opened in a new tab.

List of changes in the latest Parents Booking release:

• Video Calls: Automatically create video/’virtual’ parents’ evening meetings from pre-booked appointments
• New parents’ area website design
• Creating Teacher Logins/Accounts
• Automatically Detect Student ‘Leavers’
• Disconnect Students from Old Teachers/Classes
• Single Sign-On (SSO) using Firefly
• Upload “data” from Wonde in one click
• Upload “data” from SIMS ID

If you have any questions please do contact hello@knowledge.parents-booking.com or support@knowledge.parents-booking.com.