Running a conference from start to finish

A conference is one day (or evening) when parents book short video meetings with their child's teachers. Here is what happens at each stage and what you do.

Draft

You create the conference and it starts as a draft. Only staff can see it. While it is a draft you can change anything: date, hours, slot length, which classes take part. Teachers can already open it from their side and block out times they cannot make; those blocks survive publishing.

Use the draft stage to check the slot grid on the conference's Full page: one column per teacher, one box per bookable time.

Published

Publish opens booking. Two things happen at once: parents of every student in the selected classes get an email inviting them to book, and the conference appears on their dashboard.

After publishing, the date, hours and slot length are locked — families are booking against them. You can still edit the title, description and the time-clock options, and you can add more classes. If the schedule itself is wrong, cancel this conference and create a new one.

If you set a booking window, parents can only book (or move or cancel) between the opens-at and closes-at times. The office can always book on a family's behalf, window or not.

Filling up

The conference's full page shows not booked yet: every student whose family has not picked a time, grouped by teacher, with parent emails. Email a reminder sends one nudge per parent. Parents who never set a password are flagged — they cannot book until they do, so those are worth a phone call, and you can resend their setup email from Families.

The Schedule page shows the same day as a grid and lets you book for a family by clicking an open slot.

Conference day

On the day the conference moves to In progress by itself. Teachers open their Meeting Room, see their bookings in order, and join each one. Parents see a Join button 15 minutes before their time. If you turned on the time clock, both sides see a countdown and the call ends when the slot is used up.

You can watch it all from the Schedule page — a red line marks the current time.

Afterwards

The day after, the conference becomes Completed. Meetings the teacher marked as complete or no-show are recorded on Bookings and count towards the completion rate on your dashboard.

Completed conferences drop to the bottom of the list, and after a term they fold away under Show older. When you are done with one, Archive it from its panel; nothing is deleted and you can restore it any time.

Cancelling

Cancel conference (in the conference's panel, for published conferences) cancels every booking and emails each family. Use it when the date has to change: cancel, then create the new one.