Online Parent-Teacher-Student conferences using Microsoft Teams
Part of our COVID experience when our students were learning from home was to run our usual parent-teacher interviews for pastoral and academic progress as online video meetings.
We were able to take advantage of the CISCO’s free offer of Webex to run those conferences. Webex provided a simple user experience of creating a meeting room that you could utilise at any time to run your meetings by sharing the one link. All parents had the same link, irrespective of the day or time of your meetings. When the CISCO offer ended, we had to identify the simplest and most efficient alternative.
Microsoft Teams has developed its online video chat and Meet Now facilities to the point that we can now easily recreate the user experience of a meeting lobby. You create a single instance of a calendar meeting and share its link via email with anyone (as opposed to adding people as attendees in the calendar event). Through this link they can join your meeting lobby, where they remain until you let them in. When one conference finishes, you can start another by letting the next group in from the lobby.
While the original meeting is in your calendar at a specific time and day, the link is always live so you can initiate another series of meetings using the same link at any time. Microsoft state that the link is only valid for 60 days, however I have reused my link many months after it was created, and it still works.
Below is a short vodcast explaining how easy it is to set all this up.
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