Organising Remote Parent-Teacher Meetings

As we all continue to adapt to life with restrictions, and with many schools still closed across the world, it is important to keep checking in with your school community.

Children have been taking up the challenge to learn remotely, and parents have been learning to balance their own remote working with home-schooling. Thanks to some of the amazing resources schools and individual teachers have provided, students are able to continue their studies from their homes, largely keeping to their usual curriculum. As the time continues to stretch ahead, it may become important to make time to schedule individual remote sessions with parents to ensure their child is keeping up with the work being set and for the parents to ask help and guidance from their subject or class teachers.  This is where SchoolsBuddy can help. One of our popular modules will enable class or subject teachers to create a schedule of appointments available for parents to book via the SchoolsBuddy system. Designed to organise appointments for in-school Parent Teacher Conferences (Parents Evenings), our module can easily be adapted for use during school closure for organising remote sessions between parents and teachers. Some of the key benefits and features of organising remote sessions with SchoolsBuddy are:

• Ability to vary appointment length and interval duration
• Easy to view calendar for each staff member showing their schedule of remote appointments
• Availability of built-in reporting to check appointment sign up
• Being able to block time for breaks

Your school admin team will need to set your appointment schedule in SchoolsBuddy, either creating sessions for all teachers at the same time or with a little more work bespoke dates and times per teacher can be added. Using the system in the usual way, parents can go onto their SchoolsBuddy account and book appointments for the teacher or teachers they need to speak to. As always, multiple children will be shown on the same screen and adjacent appointments will be blocked out to eliminate double bookings. UPDATE 08 APR 20 In response to the needs of remote learning, we have now added the capability of including the URL of each teacher's remote meeting space (eg. Zoom) to their SchoolsBuddy profile.  This will help facilitate remote parent teacher meetings with the link appearing in the parent’s email appointment confirmation and the corresponding event within their SchoolsBuddy calendar. We recommend using this feature as a optional service for parents to reach out to teachers remotely if there is a need, rather than requiring parents to book appointments with all their children's teachers. It would also be advisable to allow greater intervals between appointments to allow changeover between remote meetings. Find out more about our Parent Teacher Conference module. Don’t forget, during the Covid-19 pandemic we are offering free-access to our software to new customers: Covid-19 free access offer  For more information about how SchoolsBuddy can help your school, Schedule a Demo.