Parents Evening: FAQs
Check below for common questions regarding the Video Appointments feature of SchoolCloud Parents Evening.
Can multiple teachers join the same video call?
Yes, up to 3 teachers, in different locations, can be part of the same video call with the parent. The teachers have to be booked together in a single appointment, and the class needs to be set up in Configure Evening > Class Teachers with multiple teachers, ensuring you select the An appointment will all teachers at the same time option.
Please see the following help article Substituting teachers, disabling classes and managing shared classes for more information.
Can multiple parents join the same video call from different locations?
Currently each video appointment can only accommodate one parent (and up to 3 teachers) with no way to involve more than one parent in an appointment - unless they are all in the same room and using the same camera/microphone.
We know that many schools would like to be able to include more than one parent location and we intend to add that feature later in 2020.
Do we have to make any firewall changes?
If you plan on having teachers connect to Video Appointments from within the school network, please ask your IT team to consider the Network Requirements for Firewalls and Web-Filters guide.
How do parents join the video call?
Parents simply access the system on the day of their appointments and press the Join Video Appointments button at the top of their screen. There's also a link sent to parents in their email confirmation to join the video call.
How do we see if a parent attended the video call?
You can view attendance via the Manage Appointments page and in Attendance Reports.
When a parent attends a video call, their attendance is automatically changed to Present for the appointment.
If they do not log in to an appointment it is left as Unknown. A status of Absent will only show if an admin or teacher has specifically set that status on an appointment.
What are the bandwidth requirements?
Video calling should adapt to the available bandwidth. The recommended bandwidth for video calls for popular video conferencing solutions tends to be around 1-3 Mbps per call, and we would recommend considering this as a guide. For example: with 50 simultaneous video calls being made on a school's network you could expect to use 50-150 Mbps bandwidth.
Can I run a test evening to see how it works from a teacher & parent perspective?
To test how a video parents' evening works you can set up a simple parents' evening (see Video: Configure an Evening to be held over video call) and then you can get a teaching colleague to help you, or log in as them yourself if you have access, whilst for the parent side of things you can:
- get an existing parent to agree to help you test things out, or
- use a colleague within the school who is also a parent, or
- make use of the fact that you can log in as any parent (see Logging in as a parent to check what they see for more details). You can temporarily change that parent's email address to your own (via Data > Parents) so that they are not sent any confirmation emails during the test.
Can video calls be recorded?
It's not possible to record calls. Please note that anyone can use screen recording software on their smartphone/computer, and as such it's impossible to prevent any party from recording the call at their own end.
Can a live transcript/subtitles be shown?
It's not possible to show subtitles.
Camera Issue with Microsoft Surface devices
We are aware of an issue causing Surface devices to use the rear camera to be used, even though we request the front camera.
This works fine in Firefox as they've worked around this issue with Surface devices.
Alternatively, you can disable the rear facing camera (if you are using a PC) by going to Device Manager > Imaging devices > then right click the rear-facing camera and choose disable. In the near future, we will be releasing an option to choose a different camera, so the issue will no longer arise.