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Hello EduGeek! We're delighted to be sponsoring the Educational Software forum for the next few months. Our company has two main products: the Room Booking System and Parents Evening System, each managing millions of bookings for schools worldwide. We focus on making easy to use high quality software that just works, which is why we're SIMS Technical Partners & Advanced Learning Partners. The Room Booking System is the market leading web based room & resource management system designed specifically for schools to manage the ever growing number of resources such as IT rooms, laptop trolleys, iPads, sports facilities & meeting rooms. It fully integrates with SIMS, Facility, Progresso and iSAMS so all timetable information (and cover for SIMS) is automatically synced. LDAP authentication and single sign-on are also supported meaning the system runs itself without any manual intervention. We offer a 30 day free trial at www.roombookingsystem.co.uk The Parents Evening System allows parents to book appointments with teachers online. Parents no longer need to rely on their child to make appointments or worry about their return slip getting lost at the bottom of the schoolbag. The system integrates with SIMS & Facility so the system knows exactly who teaches each child. The school can view reports of parent attendance and track which students haven't booked appointments. You can use the system for one live evening for free - apply at www.parentseveningsystem.co.uk Do you already use our software or have any questions? We'd love to hear from you - please post your comments/questions below and we'd be happy to answer them.

I'm looking at trying to streamline our process of scheduling parents evening. Currently we are receiving requests from parents then creating a schedule to distribute that can accomodate everyone and give as optimal evening as possible. Needless to say, although it has its benefits, there is a lot of time that has to be invested in a single evening and in a growing school (1000+ students in our Upper school) this isn't going to improve. I know a number of schools have been using online solutions allowing parents to directly book appointments themselves. It would be great to know what solutions schools have been using and could recommend (including feedback from parents and staff) but also how any pit-falls have been addressed. My main concerns would be the difficulties parents have to book appointments if they are one of the last to do so and also where teachers only have a few appointments how to prevent them from being spread out across the duration of the event.

Hi, It's been decided here that teachers need their laptops accessible (so they can access SIMS, SISRA, etc) during parents evenings. The event is to be held in 2 halls in rows of tables and as their laptop batteries won't last, they all need a power socket available to plug into. All 70 staff. Each laptop is rated at a maximum of 1.5A each, so a maximum of 105A, but likely less - I need to do some testing of nominal current draw. We've worked out a system of 14 extension reels and 28 4 ways where we can connect to the few power sockets on the walls in the hall (and I've asked the electrician to check that we won't overload the ring mains). We'll need about a mile of sticky tape I think to safely tape down all the necessary cabling. We can install some extra wireless access points to (hopefully) provide network to all these laptops. It'll take us quite a while to setup and take down we reckon, not that is a problem, but I wondered how does everyone else manage with laptops or parents evenings or does everyone stick with paper copies of data? Many thanks for thoughts/ideas. Meldrew