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.