Jan 28, 2018

Running your first round of interviews can be somewhat daunting to begin with.  It’s a new system to learn and may take you a little while to learn the idiosyncrasies of this particular application.  Be assured however that we have designed Sobs to be easy to use and will give you as much help as […]

Jan 23, 2018

You can easily move bookings around, however this is normally only used in consultation with the parent involved. Bookings should only be deleted at the parent’s request. Moving a booking From the list of interview rounds click the ‘View my bookings’ button This will display a list of time slots.  Green slots are still available.  […]

We were recently asked if there were and generic help documents that could be provided to staff.  We thought this was a good idea so we created an article on how to use Parent/Teacher interviews from a staff perspective, logging in, viewing bookings, marking unavailability, etc. URL access to the site We strongly recommend that […]

You can choose from a couple of preset reports or a simple report wizard. To access the reports click ‘My interviews’ or ‘Interview Rounds’ in the left hand menu.  The application will show you a list of interview rounds that have been run or scheduled for your school.  In the ‘Options’ column click the ‘Report’ […]

This is a booking method selected when creating a new round of interviews. This option will allow parents to make a single booking only, and they will not be prompted to select the staff member – the system currently allocates the first available staff member from a pre-defined list of staff.  More about this later. […]

The teacher selection criteria indicates how the system will select staff when making bookings.  The default and recommended option is to use “Year levels” Parent perspective When the parent enters their child’s name into the system they are also prompted to enter a year level.  This simple piece of information helps us limit the number […]

The teacher selection criteria indicates how the system will select staff when making bookings.  We have included an option to allow selection by subject, however this is more complicated than the default of year levels. The selection also allows a combination of year levels and subject selection – this is the option we will describe […]

Sobs includes a compliance notice facility.  The compliance notice allows the school the option of having the parents acknowledge some conditions of use prior to the parent entering any data into the booking system. Why would you use a compliance notice? Originally we wrote this to comply with education department legal requirements.  Parents are going […]

Generally SOBS Parent/Teacher interview booking works very successfully without requiring parents to have passwords, and in practice the vast majority of schools using this system use it without this requirement. However, for those schools who want to ensure a parent’s password is required then this option is available. Configuring this option There are a couple […]

This article describes the effect of running synchronous or overlapping interview rounds. Why would you schedule overlapping interview rounds? There are potentially a number of reasons to do this, however for most schools there will normally only be one interview round happening at a time.  So let’s start by considering some reasons why you might […]

Shared teaching, or teachers sharing classes, is reasonably common in primary schools, and at interview times the parent needs to meet with both of the teachers, not just one.  As of March 2015 Sobs supports ‘Shared Teaching’ configuration, where we specify a class with a primary and any number of secondary teachers. Setup At the […]

When running regular parent/teacher interviews there are on occasion parents that we want to book interviews in order to discuss aspects of their child’s education.  To achieve this end we can configure a ‘push-request’ that will be emailed to the parent requesting them to make a booking. Enabling Push Requests This only needs to be […]

One of the first questions we get asked is about the parent access security.  Specifically, “where is it?”.  When we tell first time users that there isn’t any they seem quite taken aback with the idea.  There was however a lot of thought put into this decision, so let us explain how we arrived at […]

Every so often there is a parent without internet access where the school will be required to place a booking on behalf of the parent. The regular parent access The simplest method is for school staff to use the parent interface to make and adjust bookings as requested by parents.  You can access the parent […]

We have on occasion been asked if there are any generic instructions available that schools can use to send parents – well now there are.  These documents were originally shared with us by a school and have been modified substantially to be suitably generic. URL access to the site We strongly recommend that you include […]

When parents are wanting to book an enrolment interview we will typically use the ‘Parents meet pre-selected staff’ option, however the parent still has to enter their child’s name and year level.  The problem comes when they are entering a year level – do they enter the current year level or the year level they […]