Teaching with Technology

Arranging the timetable for parents evening can be a real hassle in terms of the communication that is involved.   Parents keep asking for times that are taken and cancelling others, often leading to a mass of notes flying backwards and forwards between teacher and parent.  

This year I decided that it would be different…

As normal I sent out the letters asking the parents to state the time that they wanted for the parents evening.  (I suppose that next year I could do this via a GDocs form, but hey ho hindsight is a wonderful thing!)   When the responses came back I set up a GDoc with a simple table in it showing the times that had been booked in the first wave.

I then sent out an email to all the children which included the document so that they could show their parents which times they had been allocated.   One point to note.   I made sure that the parents could only read the document and not contribute to it directly as I could foresee a scenario of people changing appointments etc.  

I asked them to email me if there were any problems with the times and I was quite suprised at how well this system worked as you can see below.

It turned out to be a really efficient method of communication with the parents that saved an awful lot of stress.   The parents really seemed to appreciate the simplicity too.