Parent/Tutor and Open Evening, etc - how are you doing it; Teams, Telephony???

[Ben_Stanton]

Has anybody got Microsoft Booking running for such an event?

[ABR82]

I looked at this the other day, but on our licence it doesn't seem to be available. A shame as it seems like ti'd work really well.

[sonofsanta]

Update on our plan, ahead of our Yr11 parents' evening tomorrow night...

 

Inviting kids into the meeting (a) took too much out of the five minute slot (b) sometimes hit a bug with the phone app where the call didn't display, only the missed call notification © made it a pain when parents were in two different places and needed inviting in via their own email address rather than using their kid's username

 

So this time we've closed bookings a day earlier, emailed the schedule out to all staff, and teachers are now scheduling individual meetings in Teams (in their private channel still). That takes 10/15 minutes this morning, but hopefully all the time used in advance is time saved during the evening itself when it's at more of a premium. The kids then get an email with the link and they can forward it on as they need (we have the lobby enabled for people outside our organisation) or follow the link themselves at the time. The teacher can just quickly skip through the meetings in Teams--no more disconnecting parents if time runs short, they just hang up and join the next meeting.

 

That should work more reliably, be easier for the kids to arrange things their end, and make it quicker to switch between meetings so that time doesn't feel so rushed.

 

Technically, though, Teams held up pretty well last time--well enough that we're sticking with it for now and refining our plans rather than moving to an entirely different system!

[StevieM]

We're using the bookings system in Bromcom's MCAS app (first time, and I swear-to-god a full half of my week so far has been explaining to parents, over and over, that they should enter their username where it says username, and not their email or any other random piece of data) and then we're going to use Teams for the actual calls. Staff are going to create a private Team with only them in it, start a meeting, then one-by-one invite parents in via their child's school account, and forcibly disconnect them if time is up.

 

So each teacher's entire evening was a single meeting, with parents being invited to join ad hoc? I'm thinking of having individual meetings scheduled in advance, with parents waiting in their own virtual lobby. Is there any reason your way would work better?

 

EDIT: Hahahahahaha! I should have read to the end of the thread before posting this!

Edited October 19, 2020 by StevieM

[sonofsanta]

So each teacher's entire evening was a single meeting, with parents being invited to join ad hoc? I'm thinking of having individual meetings scheduled in advance, with parents waiting in their own virtual lobby. Is there any reason your way would work better?

 

EDIT: Hahahahahaha! I should have read to the end of the thread before posting this!

 

 

You should but congratulations on having a better idea in the first place than I did! I was trying to avoid creating work for teachers, but in the end they're the same amount of work--but this new way brings the work out of the time-sensitive evening itself, and leaves more time in the appointments for actual conversation instead of technical gubbins.

 

As an update, scheduling individual appointments worked really, really well. I recorded a two-minute video with OBS and a mic showing how you could copy the kid's name from the schedule I sent out, paste it into the Subject, paste it into the Recipient field and click the search result, amend the date/times and click Send. (I'd share the video, but it has kids' names in it, sorry.) We gave staff two days to do that but in future I want to give them a full week. We only had one parent phone up to say their darling hadn't forwarded the emails on, but otherwise it went really smoothly as a process.

[rogerdnixon]

Open evening we live stream to YouTube and pop a Google Form link in the video description for questions. Use OBS for the live stream and stream whatever - normally some videos and a Google Meet. Works fine and minimal effort.

 

Parents evenings, we use Google Meet. We do the appointments as normal via Parentmail. Export them and use a bit of Sheets scripting to generate Meet links. Staff get a doc with their appointments and parents get emailed out a list of appointments with the relevant Meet links. Worked last week without issue and staff and parents seemed to think it was a much better way of doing it, so it might stick as the way we do them from now on rather than the hall bun fight.

[StevieM]

Thanks for the extra information! We'll use contact information from SIMS rather than pupils email addresses, although we may need to find a way of ensuring that we're speaking to the right people! We've not used Teams here at all, apart from a few external meetings, so it's going to be a bit of a steep learning curve for all concerned. Staff will definitely need to spend a bit of time practising setting up and switching between meetings.

 

One thing I have noticed is that replying to a meeting invitation deletes the email with the link automatically and places the event in the calendar instead. At least, it does in OWA; I'll have to test with some different email addresses.

[MYK-IT]

A step-by-step tutorial on how to use Microsoft Bookings for parent teacher conferences. How to set up and schedule parent-teacher conferences using Microsoft Bookings for education. This includes built-in Microsoft Teams meetings integration with Bookings. Bookings is a great tool to easily set up remote parent-teacher conferences and let educators easily manage complex schedules. Bookings is also useful for teachers to manage Office Hours.

 

[DrCheese]

Did our first Year 7 tutor evening via the School Cloud system last night - I don't think staff will ever want to go back to in person appointments!

 

The biggest thing is the fixed appointment time - You're either ready for your appointment, or you miss it. There's no over running, so people have to be quick & can't eat into a teachers time which would normally happen on a normal evening - Causing queues outside classrooms and making people stay late.

 

Considering the low cost to add the video appointments, I'd say it's worth every penny. I don't have to faff around building a booking system or shoehorning the MS booking system to do it, it just works.

[fiza]

Parents evenings, we use Google Meet. We do the appointments as normal via Parentmail. Export them and use a bit of Sheets scripting to generate Meet links. Staff get a doc with their appointments and parents get emailed out a list of appointments with the relevant Meet links. Worked last week without issue and staff and parents seemed to think it was a much better way of doing it, so it might stick as the way we do them from now on rather than the hall bun fight.

@rogerdnixon You wouldn't consider sharing the sheets script would you?

[StevieM]

It's now been suggested that we use something from Groupcall that will, from what I understand, setup meetings from online bookings, show onscreen timings and automatically disconnect. Anyone know anything about/have any experience of this?

[Garacesh]

Did anyone use, or has anyone used, parentseveningsystem.co.uk* for video conferencing?

 

SLT here say we use it for bookings, and their support page does have some comprehensive video calling info, just wondering if anyone can tell me how reliable it is.

 

* Edit: Looks like they're also known as roombookingsystem.co.uk and schoolcloud.co.uk too.

Edited November 17, 2020 by Garacesh

[ajg]

Yes we used school cloud/parentseveningsoftware for the first time last week for Y13 parents evening. I decided to stick around after finishing work just in case any support calls came in as most staff stayed in school to do it.....I had exactly no calls or emails for the entire parents evening.

 

It worked perfectly, to the point I ended up wandering round school to find teachers to see how they were getting on with it. Teachers loved it (partly due to the fact you it’s a set time limit per meeting) and early feedback is parents liked it too as a lot easier for them. Strongly suspect we’ll continue to use going forwards.

 

A bit of work to do firewall side but the council does this for us and were very obliging.

[danielghares]

We've done a couple of parents evenings virtually now and they've gone surprisingly well. We're a google based school, so using meet sessions was our preferred option.

Our admin staff generated a big spreadsheet with all our appointments in, parent / teacher email addresses, etc.. I then put this through a PowerShell script I made, which would automatically generate a google meet session for each appointment, invite the relevant parents / staff, and send a summary email to each parent with all their appointments in. This was all using GAM. I even scripted it so that it would automatically deal with any appointment time slot changes and email address changes (which turned out useful, as the amount of parents who don't know what a google account is was surprising...).

On the evening everything went smoothly - teachers could just look in their google calendar for their next appointments, as the meet links has auto created associated calendar entries too.

[DaveA]

Did our first Year 7 tutor evening via the School Cloud system last night - I don't think staff will ever want to go back to in person appointments!

 

The biggest thing is the fixed appointment time - You're either ready for your appointment, or you miss it. There's no over running, so people have to be quick & can't eat into a teachers time which would normally happen on a normal evening - Causing queues outside classrooms and making people stay late.

 

Considering the low cost to add the video appointments, I'd say it's worth every penny. I don't have to faff around building a booking system or shoehorning the MS booking system to do it, it just works.

 

We are about to do our third parents evening tonight using School cloud. I would agree I have not had hardly any support calls and both parents and teachers seem to like it. I think our school will also stick with this even when things get back to normal.

Edited November 18, 2020 by DaveA

[cw222]

Did anyone use, or has anyone used, parentseveningsystem.co.uk* for video conferencing?

 

Worked well overall. The only issue we had was parents connections(1 issue maybe 2)