PTC Scheduling Overview
This page gives a high level overview of how Parent-Teacher conferences function.
Power PTC is a scheduling solution that is designed to have parents create their schedule with teachers at their convenience. Power PTC also attempts to give parents complete control of scheduling by allowing them to choose what day to attend conferences (if conferences are setup to span multiple days) as well as choose a starting time within that day to attend conferences. After this point, Power PTC will attempt to automatically build the best schedule based on this criteria.
There are two modes in which parents are able to schedule their conferences, automatic and manual. Automatic mode is presented to parent’s by default, this mode asks the user to select a conference date and starting time. With this information, the scheduling engine will attempt to create the best schedule it can. It should also be noted that this mode will automatically add one meeting period length padding between each appointment to allow for travel times between appointments. In some cases, this may not be desirable and can be disable in Misc settings for Power PTC. Manual scheduling allows parents to schedule each of their student’s courses one at a time.
Parent-Teacher Conferences in Power PTC are completely bases on a student’s course schedule. This means that Power PTC can only schedule appointments with instructors of courses that are part of the student’s schedule.
Power PTC requires that a master schedule is created within Power PTC prior to opening scheduling for parents. The master schedule in Power PTC will combine date information and resources or teachers to generate a schedule that parents can then schedule into. Once a master schedule has been created and parents have started scheduling into it very few modifications can be made to the schedule without adversely affecting existing parent’s schedules. It is very important that date information as well as resource information are entered correctly prior to opening scheduling to the public.
Power PTC will gracefully handle parents that have multiple students enrolled in the district. If the students are all activated under a single account, then Power PTC will ensure that appointments do not overlap. When the parent generates a print version of their schedule, it will combine their appointments into a single report.