With schools closed and online teaching, parent-teacher meetings should not take a back seat.
Parent-teacher meeting is important to keep both sides informed about the child’s education status as well as wellbeing that has a direct impact on the performance of students. There are various aspects to a student’s education performance that go beyond how well they do in their exams and their responsiveness in the classroom. The parent-teacher communication mustn’t hinder so that children’s wellbeing and education status is known by both the parents as well as educators.
The tools mentioned below can help educators fix an appointment for parent-teacher conferences:
JotForm
This is a great tool to schedule and define the meeting. You can add features to the form as per your need. There are features to define the purpose of the meeting. Be it a quarter academic discussion or ways you want parents to support kids in online teaching. You can add a brief and inform parents in advance about what is going to be discussed. It also clarifies parent that any in-depth meeting which would require more time must be requested and scheduled separately. In cases of holding an academic meeting, there is a feature where you could list all subject teachers and parents can tick on any specific teacher they would like to speak to. In the appointment booking section, parents can see the available slots and can reserve their slots as per their convenience. You can set appointment slots of 15, 30, 45, or 60 minutes. Once an appointment has been claimed it can't be claimed by anyone else visiting your form.
Choice Eliminator 2
A lot of educators use Google forms for multiple purposes. For those educators using Google forms for Scheduling parent-teacher meeting Choice Eliminator is a useful add-on. It removes answer choices from a question as they get used up. This is a perfect fit for educators who are hosting individual emergency meetings. You can make a question in Google forms and list the available appointment times are mentioned in a drop-down menu. Once a time has been chosen by one form respondent it cannot be claimed by anyone else. However, it does not eradicate the chosen time for the next person filling the form. So the utility lies in while scheduling the meeting for a single child and you can share your available timings where parents get to pick one from your availability.
Calendly
Calendly is an appointment scheduling software. The tool can make it easy for you to schedule parent-teacher meetings. The tool comes in a freemium version. While the free model has limited features, it will sort the problem of scheduling for you. It enables you to easily create appointment slots with just a click or two. People who want to schedule an appointment with you just have to click a time on your calendar and enter their names to reserve an appointment. Visitors don't need to have a Google Account to view or enter their information into an appointment slot. Visitors who make appointments with you through this tool can sync the appointment to their own Google Calendars, iCal, or Outlook calendars.
Google Calendar Appointment Slots
This is “the tool” for educators who do not wish to use a separate tool or app to manage and schedule the parent-teacher meeting and appointments. With this in action educators can easily set up a block of appointments on their calendar that other people can reserve. For example, teachers can invite their students’ parents to reserve time during workdays as needed. The tool is useful to share a particular time when you’ll be available for all parents. The availability of reserving appointment slots are useful when you don't know who needs to meet with you, but you want to make yourself available. You can offer parents a specific block of time on your calendar that they can book time slots within.
For example, you can set aside 2 hours that you're available to meet with parents in 30-minute slots. This way you can attend parents of 4 students in your available slots without having to reserve a specific day dedicated to the parent-teacher meeting. Other than this, this is useful to be available for urgent sessions with parents. Parents can book one of the 30-minute slots within that time that works best for them. Using appointment slots in Google Calendar makes scheduling very easy compared to trying to use email, a spreadsheet, or even a shared Google Calendar.
ClassTag
ClassTag provides a simple and free communication platform for parents, teachers and school leaders, with automated translation in multiple languages and channel. It allows parents to access information on events, field trips, volunteer opportunities, donation requests; and teachers to engage with parents, schedule parent-teacher conferences, share resources, as well as receive much-needed funding healthy, happy and wholesome brand sponsors.
Also Read: Parent-Teacher Conferences During COVID: 10 Things to Know
You must hold a virtual parent-teacher meeting so that you can inform the parent about your students’ performance as well as can get a better understanding of why your student doesn’t seem to perform well. There are times when the student’s unexplainable behaviour and the reason for the same are well understood by parents that educators may not be aware of. There could be some problems students are dealing with on a personal end that is affecting their performance in the classroom that you aren’t aware of. By staying connected with the parents you get a better understanding of students’ wellbeing and can further take action or deal with the students as needed.
How do you schedule your parent-teacher conferences? Share with us in the comments section below.
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