Teach42

I may not be working at a school right now, but I still wake up in a cold sweat when I think about scheduling parent teacher conferences. For years, it was an absolute nightmare for everybody involved. The parents had problems getting times that worked for them, in blocks that actually made sense. Teachers either had huge chunks of free time or no breaks for hours on end. And anybody who was involved in setting it up was usually swamped for weeks leading up to conference day, as everybody kept trying to tweak their own schedule to make it a little more palatable.

Graphtech, a company I worked regularly with when I was a Director of Technology, created a program called PTConference Maker. I got involved with it pretty early on, but even with the bugs that we ran into at the time it made my life infinitely easier. It’s a web based system for conference scheduling, and takes the pain out of it. Using a series of spreadsheets, you assign students to their teachers and classes (I exported my data out of Powerschool). Then, on signup day, parents log on to the website and choose which teachres they want to meet with, whether they want breaks in between their conferences, and what times are most convenient for them. The software does the rest.

They keep improving it every year, and while I haven’t played around with this years demo, it looks like they’ve made some nice upgrades yet again. Parents can block out certain times that they’re unavailable, print out partial schedules, now teachers can get a limited login to tweak their own scheudle and breaks if they want! That would have greatly reduced the number of phone calls I fielded during those weeks leading up to conferences.

One other thing I loved about it was the support they provided. Obviously the first few days of registration are the most intense. Graphtech provides full phone support, so instead of answer hundreds of “I can’t find my password” and “Should I click ‘ok’ when it tellls me to click ‘ok’” types of questoins, Graphetch can field them all and just pass along the really tricky ones that need more personal attention.

If you haven’t moved to online conference scheduling yet, or aren’t satisifed with what you’re using, this is a solution that I’ve used and can wholly reccomend. Heh, and if you do look them up, tell them that I sent you their way. They’ll get a kick out of that!