PTC Video Series Script

This document shows the original script

used for the PTC Video Series begun in 2023.

The project was postponed after the completion of five videos (available here), and will resume, be”H, during this year (2024).

The script, which includes the base script used for the five already-published videos, is comprehensive… and very long. Additionally, it is a “script” alone, so it does not necessarily clearly outline how to find every button or screen discussed.

Therefore, while you may certainly choose to read it in its entirety, it will likely be most useful to you if used as an encyclopedic reference manual when you need specific detailed instructions for localized portions of PTC setup.

Just search for keywords when needed… enjoy!

Hi, let’s talk about Parent Teacher Conferences.

First, I’ll give some general tips, and an overview of how Parent Teacher Conferences works in Admire, and then we’ll get into the nitty-gritty of actually scheduling your conferences so everything goes smoothly on the big evening.

First, the tips:

Tip Number One, and this is very, very important: This video outlines the “best practice” and suggested ways to use Parent Teacher Conferences in Admire. Please follow THESE guidelines. That’s not to say you can’t possibly manage to use the software successfully in a different way if you try to, or if you’re used to it from previous years and know how to handle it—- but, but then you’re kinda on your own. The methods outlined in this video are what we support, and really cover the needs of the overwhelming majority of schools.

Tip number two, on our basic training video, we said that retrieval of your data can only be as powerful as the level of precision with which you input that data. Well, that’s true here, as well, of course. Updates of your data, management of your data – can all ONLY be… as powerful as the level of precision with which you input that data. It’s true in regards to the actual setup of the ptc itself, and it’s true regarding if you’re imprecise throughout the year – perhaps imprecise with the enrollments for each kid, or maybe you have them in the wrong class but the right course or you aren’t careful to mark down divorces or deaths, rachmana litzlan, properly – your data – and that includes your PTC, will be messy! So, throughout the year! – always remember: management of your data – can ONLY be… as powerful as the level of precision with which you input that data.

Tip number three, We strongly suggest filling out the PTC Questionnaire that you’ll find on our knowledgebase. You can freeze the screen here and copy out the exact link so you can find it.

https://admire.document360.io/docs/ptcquestionnaire

It’s for your use, and will help you have clarity on the various points you’ll need to tell the system about when setting things up. Of utmost importance, of course, is to clarify that every student is enrolled in their proper courses. Print out a student list for each teacher – you can use the “student list - by course (enrollment list),” hand each teacher their list, and ask them to make sure it is correct.

Fourth tip: For clarity, it’s important to realize when an Admire screen or module is working with Accounts and when it is working instead with individuals. PTC works on the individual level.

In fact, as we’ll see later, the system even has the option to automatically create individuals for accounts that need PTC appointments, because the appointments are connected to the individuals and not the accounts.

This is actually very logical, because you want each individual to be able to have precise scheduling and be able to have their own exact schedule for the night. For instance, some parents may be teachers in the school, and the system would need to ensure that no overlaps occur between their family’s own appointments and their class’s appointments, or ensure that they are personally marked as not attending but their spouse is marked as attending.

Fifth and last general tip: many Admire screens that seem pretty NOT user-friendly, can actually be very easily adapted to suit your preferences.

Depending on the screen, you can change the order of columns, organize by one – and sometimes more than one – column(s)… in up to two ways, change the column and box sizing, change the spacing between rows, change the sizing on your screen on your browser itself, highlight a row, expand hidden i.d. columns (as well as other hidden columns) for cross-checking, and search for a particular piece of data. Almost every screen and dropdown in Admire has at least some of those options, check them out, some of them make you click on a specific column first, just play with it – it’s really worthwhile to adjust the screen to your preferred view and truly changes the whole Admire experience.

Now, here’s the overview of how PTC setup works, and then we’ll get right into the details: When setting up Parent Teacher Conferences in Admire, you’ll first need to create the existence of the conference evening itself: the date and time, how many hours it’ll be, how many minutes each actual parent teacher meeting will be, and so forth.

Once that’s done, you have a structure for your Parent Teacher Conferences! It’s happening.

Now, you might think: Alright, now that the structure is set up, let’s just schedule the appointments and shalom al Yisroel… but not so fast. Each appointment has its own details and, as we said, is connected to specific individuals… you really need all the details of each appointment to move seamlessly together whenever being adjusted – so actually, each appointment first needs to be created as an actual “thing,” and then you can schedule them into their neat little slots.

For scheduling, there are three options. One, you can manually drag each and every appointment in the grid one by one. That can get very tedious, though.

Option two is to have the system auto-schedule the appointments. (In a limited way, you’ll be able to manually schedule a few before or after running the auto-scheduler… although you’ll be limited by various factors.)

Option three is to actually allow the parents to schedule the appointments themselves via the parent portal. You’ll post the appointments to the portal, and then upload the appointments to Admire afterward. Keep in mind that the Parent Portal does not update Admire in real time – you need to click a few buttons to import the chosen times – so you can’t just have the appointments available on Parent portal as you at the same time are busy scheduling appointments yourself or with the auto-scheduler; it would cause messy overlaps.

So there’s really three steps to setting up PTC in Admire: One, you create the conference and its structure. Two, you “create the appointments.” Three, you schedule ’em either manually, or with the push of a button via our incredible auto-scheduler, or via uploading them to the parent portal.

We’ll discuss each part in turn.

One, creating the conference: creating the Parent Teacher Conference night and its structure as a whole.

You’ll do this anew each semester whenever you schedule a new PTC… so, generally, a few times per year. Of course, often you’ll be able to mostly copy whatever you entered last time, or at least use it to help you decide what times you need.

You’ll use these two screens for this setup stage. When you’re up to the creating appointments stage, you’ll use this set of screens.

First, these screens.

On these screens, you’ll choose a date and time to hold your PTC, you’ll create the STRUCTURE for the little slots of times you’ll use later in the process to create and schedule appointments… and you’ll also create breaks.

Now, breaks get confusing, so let me be very clear – there are really four totally separate types of breaks that can be inserted into your schedule, and all are set up on different screens. One here, one here, and one here and one here.

Picture a Parent Teacher Conference. You’ll start at the start date and time. The first appointments will take place. And then what? There are parents and teachers. Teachers are moving on to their next appointment, and parents are moving on to their next appointment. Should they get a break in between each appointment?

Well, let’s take the teachers. The teachers need to meet many people, obviously, so a long break for them in between each meeting is not going to work. They’ll sometimes have a long break just because that was the only way for the auto-scheduler to set things up properly, or because you allowed parents to choose from a broad range of times on the parent portal. But you’re not going to be building in a long break between every set of parents that each teacher meets. The most you’ll do is give them breathing space –   a minute, perhaps two minutes, in between each appointment.

You can choose not to give them any breathing space – perhaps they would rather it that way and perhaps finish the night quicker!

Either way, this option is not always available; it’s based on the setup track you select that I’ll talk about shortly.

Now, here’s how you can visualize what teacher breathing space would mean. It would look like this – the conference starts at its designated date and time. The various first appointments take place. Then there’s is a breathing space of a minute or two for EVERYONE. It’s the teacher’s breathing space, really, but it means there is a minute or two lull in the entire proceedings, and then the various appointments scheduled in the second slot take place, followed by a short lull and then the third appointment slot, followed by a short lull, and so on.

Now, if, as I said, those short lulls are available in your setup track, you’ll set them up in the very first setup screen that I will show you shortly.

The second type of break is a blackout time for specific teacher availability, if, let’s say a teacher or a group of teachers – perhaps a grade of teachers – are all coming late or leaving early or leaving in the middle for a while. You’ll schedule those blackout times as an appointment, actually, so that it grays out their schedule for the needed times. You’ll do that here.

The third type of break is a break for the parents. The parents may have one-or-two appointments for a single elementary school child; they may have a few more appointments if the child has many teachers, as is common in older grades; and they might have a few children in the school who each have a few appointments. SO, depending on your school and parent body and the general amount of time parents will be staying at the conferences, you’ll want to decide whether parents – and this applies whether or not you have inserted the one-or-two minute lull we just spoke about – whether parents should get their own lull in between each appointment.

The parent’s lull is inserted while running the auto-scheduler. Obviously, their lull is different from the teacher’s lull, in that the parents’ lull is just for that set of parents, of course. The proceedings continue, but this particular set of parents can have a lull of time before their next appointment.

The fourth and final break type is the, well – an actual BREAK! Basically, if you wish, you can insert extended breaks into the proceedings for everyone. These are scheduled in the second of the two setup screens I’m about to show you. So, whether there’s a short lull in between each meeting slot or not, and whether parents are getting their own private lulls in between their scheduled meetings or not… ALL attendees take a, perhaps, fifteen minute break let’s say two hours into the night… or every hour and a half, and so forth.

Many schools choose NOT to insert such a break at all; do what works best for your school.

Now, let’s get focused again on what exactly we are doing: So, back to our three steps – building the structure, creating the appointments, and finally scheduling the appointments.

We’re beginning the first step now: building the structure of the Parent Teacher Conference night as a whole using these two screens.

The first thing you’ll do, of course, is go to the School menu on the taskbar and select “setup.” Click on PTC and then PTC Setup, aaaand ohorganize this screen nicely for yourself.

Now, this is very important: There are two setup tracks.

Track one – Set up the PTC structure to work with one uniform appointment length for all your appointments.

Track one will allow you to insert the short one-to-two minute lull between appointments that we discussed before.

This track is compatible with the auto-scheduler; it is NOT compatible with the option to allow parents to schedule their own appointments on the parent portal.

Or, track two – Set up the PTC structure to work with two appointment length options of your choice.

Track two does NOT allow for a lull.

This track is compatible with both auto-scheduler and parent Portal.

So here, you can screenshot this chart:

Again, track one: one appointment length, has a lull, has auto-scheduler, NO parent portal.

Track two: two appointment lengths, NO lull, has auto-scheduler, has parent portal.

Now, it’s important to realize: We are discussing the standard situation – a school that wishes to either auto-schedule their appointments or have parents schedule themselves on the parent portal. But on both tracks, you can also manually schedule the appointments… and actually, technically, on both tracks, you will even be able to give appointments other lengths outside of the one or two official ones you choose… and you may end up with many different appointment lengths in the end – but all of those appointments with random lengths will need to be scheduled manually. So when we say you can create one uniform length or up to two lengths, that does not include appointments that you are willing to schedule manually. Those can be a variety of lengths.

So here’s the instructions for track one – one appointment length, has a lull, has auto-scheduler, NO parent portal:

You’ll type in the term, and then you’ll choose a name for this Parent Teacher Conference night.

Pick the date and a start time.

Now, how long are the appointments and how long is the lull?

Let’s say you want each appointment to be four minutes long.

Enter “Four” in the appointment duration column.

And let’s say you want a breather of one minute between appointments. For that, you’ll use the appointment interval column. The appointment interval tells the auto-scheduler how long it should wait between the START times of each appointment. So, if your appointments are four minutes long, and you set the interval to five minutes, as we’ll do here, the auto-scheduler will have to wait an extra minute, because it can only schedule appointments to start every five minutes. That gives a one-minute breather between all appointments.

Here’s a quick example: if the conference starts at 7:00 pm, the first appointment can be scheduled for 7:00, the next can be five minutes later at 7:05, the next can be at 7:10, and so on. And since each appointment is really only four minutes long, there is a one minute breather in between each one.

In theory, if both the duration and the interval were five minutes, there would be no lull, of course, because appointments would last for five minutes and then the next one would begin immediately. But here, in track one, we’re making the interval a minute longer, to get that lull between appointments.

Lastly on this screen, you’ll fill in the total duration. The total duration is the total length of time the conference is going to take. We’re going to get back to it shortly. DOn’t worry about whatever number is in it right now, because we are coming back to change it.

Moving on to PTC Breaks Setup, click School… Setup… Click on PTC and then PTC Breaks Setup.

On this screen, you’ll tell Admire when to create general breaks in the schedule for everyone. That means that the whole conference will break for a set amount of time. Now, a lot of teachers and parents would rather you get them outta the building faster, and forgo the breaks. So just make sure the breaks are actually the best fit for your school… and feel free to skip the breaks entirely, as well, if you wish! You don’t necessarily need them.

Here’s how you actually schedule one or several breaks. We’ll start with the explanation for a school that wants several breaks inserted.

Select the correct conference.

Fill in how long the breaks should be in the break duration field. Let’s fill in 10 minutes, for example. Then, in “start date and time,” fill in the date of the conference, and then make the start time precisely – this is important – precisely… a full “break-length” earlier than the conference start time. For instance, if you filled out the Conference start time on the previous screen as 7:00 pm, and in this screen you decided to set ten minute breaks, then fill out the start time In This Screen as 6:50 pm.

Just like the appointment interval on the first screen, which told Admire how often to start a new appointment, the break interval will tell Admire how often to start a new break. So if we enter “90 minutes,” a break will start every 90 minutes beginning from the break start time. If our break start time is 6:50, then a break will begin at 8:20… and then another at 9:50, and so on.

That’s important to remember – – – The interval – in our example, ninety minutes – starts from the start time you insert here on this screen, and – based on the interval – a new break is STARTED every ninety minutes.

Now, what if you wish to have just one single break during the night? Enter the desired start time for the break, preferably taking care that it starts at the beginning of an appointment interval. Just like that. And for the break interval here on this screen… just fill in anything you want, as long as it’s much longer than the conference duration.

To make sure there is no wasted time in your scheduling, make sure that both the break duration and the break interval are multiples of the appointment interval you filled in on the previous screen. To check, divide the number you entered as break duration… by the appointment interval in the previous screen. If the number you get is a whole number, with no decimal, then divide the number you entered as break interval… by the appointment interval from the last screen. If that number as well is a whole number, with no decimal, then you’re good! It works! The shading style can be left as is, and your breaks are good to go.

Now, let’s return to the first setup screen. We left out the total duration before, but now we can calculate it. So, to calculate the total duration of the entire Parent Teacher conference evening in this track, figure out which teacher has the most appointments, multiply that number by the appointment interval and then take that total and add the time of whatever breaks (if any) will be occurring during the night. Of course, if some of your teachers are department-based and instead of having a class, teach a subject to several classes or grades, make sure you include all the students they teach in total when calculating the total duration of the conference. And don’t worry about a few extra minutes to the conference when estimating. It won’t mess things up.

If you go with setup track one, then you have just completed step one out of our three steps in PTC! You completed the structural build! REMEMBER TO CAREFULLY LOOK OVER all the numbers you entered in these two setup screens. If you look everything over and everything is correct, you’ll move on to creating appointments and then scheduling them and adjusting them.

First, though, I’ll show you track two for PTC setup.

So track two – two duration options, NO lull, has auto-scheduler and parent portal.

Again, of course, you’ll use these two screens.

You’ll type in the term, choose a name and pick the date and a start time.

Now, what are your two chosen appointment durations options?

Here’s the rule: the longer one must be a multiple of the shorter one. So if one duration is five minutes long, the other could be ten minutes long; if one is three minutes, the other could be six, and so on. Decide on your two durations and insert what will be the more common one (no matter if it’s the shorter or the longer) – here in the default duration column. The second duration will be recorded later on in this process, make sure you make a note of it for yourself, so you’ll be able to enter it when needed.

As we said, of course, there is no lull in this setup track.

Now, in the appointment interval column, enter the shorter of your two durations, regardless of which is the default… just enter the shorter one.

To calculate the total duration, figure out which teacher needs to spend the longest time in appointments – remember to factor in whether the teacher is getting the longer or the shorter appointment duration, or some of each – and then take the total amount of time the teacher is spending in appointments, add in any breaks that you plan on putting in on the following break screen (if you plan on putting in any), and record the total. This is the total length of the conference. As we said, don’t worry about a few extra minutes to the conference when estimating. It won’t mess things up.

Now, very important to remember: in this track two only, regardless of whether you actually plan on creating any breaks, you still need to use the breaks screen for technical purposes. In PTC Breaks Setup, use the conference name and then – very important – put in the same time as you put for the conference start time, and then create a break of duration zero minutes. Here, take the LONGER of your two planned appointment durations and use it for the break interval. So we’ll just put in six here.

This will not actually create a real break in the conference scheduling, of course, because it’s ZERO minutes long… so you don’t need to factor it in when calculating the total conference duration on the previous screen, of course.

Then, if you wish to create actual breaks, do so exactly as we did in the previous track.

Select the correct conference. Fill in how long the breaks should be in the break duration field. We’ll use ten minutes as an example again. Then, in “start date and time,” we’ll fill in the date of the conference, and then make the start time PRECISELY a full “break” earlier than the conference start time. So we’ll enter 6:50 pm. This must be precise.

We’ll use 90 minutes again as our appointment interval, and remember, as we said, the interval – in our examples, ninety minutes – starts from the start time you insert here on this screen, and – based on the interval, a break is STARTED every ninety minutes.

For the “real” break, just as we explained in setup track one, make sure that both the break duration and the break interval are multiples of the appointment interval you filled in on the previous screen. To check, divide the break duration by the appointment interval in the previous screen. If the number you get is a whole number, with no decimal, then divide the break interval by the appointment interval in the previous screen. If the number you get is a whole number, with no decimal, then it works!

If either number ends up in a decimal, change the break or interval until the division ends up in a whole number!

Again, if you wish, you can make a break occur just once in the night. Enter the desired start time for the break –   it should start at the beginning of an appointment interval. Just like that. And for the break interval here on this screen… just fill in anything you want, but make sure that it is much longer than the conference duration.

The shading style can be left as is, of course.

After choosing which of the above-explained tracks will work best for you: setup track 1 or setup track 2, the next steps here will be to create appointments and get them scheduled.

So, we’ve graduated from the setup button where we SET UP the conference night, to the actual parent teacher conferences button, where we will actually deal with the appointments themselves.

Now, let’s check in on our PTC process: So, back to our three steps – building the structure, creating the appointments, and scheduling the appointments.

So, we’ve built the structure; that was number one. And now we are beginning the second step – creating the appointments. And once created, of course, we’ll schedule them.

There are two parts of appointment creation and scheduling: There’s creation and scheduling on a mass scale, and creation and scheduling on an individual scale. Mass creation and scheduling, as could be expected, are restricted in that they need to “make sense”: they are only available for students and parents that the system thinks are SUPPOSED TO be getting PTC appointments. The auto-scheduler DOES NOT WORK for irregular appointments, although it obviously won’t double-schedule a time-slot, of course.

So, for mass appointment creation, the system provides you with a list of the possible appointments to create, and then you choose which ones… and create them. After we discuss mass-creation now for a while, we’ll discuss manual, one-by-one creation.

Now, before we even discuss mass-creation, we need to discuss: who is included on the list of potential appointments that the system gives you for mass-creation? Which students get potential appointments?

So, the system includes any student enrolled in a course… for the term that the conference is being made for – your current term. So, any student enrolled in a course.

Now, which parents get slated to attend the appointments about the students?

So, the system will only include accounts listed as the student’s parents on the student’s page in the student browser.

(And if the parents are divorced, or the like, and both parents’ accounts are listed as such on the student browser, they’ll both be marked down for potential appointments.)

Even if an account is listed as “family” to the student on the student’s page in the student browser, or they are the responsible account for tuition, or the student is on their account – and EVEN IF THEY ARE the student’s DE-fault account… they won’t be eligible for an appointment UNLESS THEY ARE MARKED AS THE STUDENT’S PARENTS. In fact, the account (or accounts) marked as the student’s parents will be the only ones eligible for appointments – EVEN IF THE STUDENT IS NOT LINKED TO THEIR ACCOUNT AS AN INDIVIDUAL AT ALL!!

The listing of “parent” is the only data point that matters here, and ONLY accounts marked as the student’s parents will be able to receive an appointment.

So just a pro tip: if everything is going smoothly and then you notice a few accounts just not doing what they’re supposed to do… this just may be the spot to check on the relevant student’s page in student browser, so you can make the appropriate changes. And by-the-way, if you need to change the parents on the student’s page, don’t forget to click save once you do it. It’s confusing, because if the student is not an individual on the account that you are marking as the parents, the system will ask you on the spot if you want to add the student to the account, and once you answer that question, it’s easy to assume that the change already registered, but actually, even though you may indeed have already added the individual to the account, the change of parents does not register until you click save!

Now, this whole issue is not likely to present too often, because when you first enter a student, their parents are marked automatically. However, if you take the individual who is a student and change its account on Admire (which can happen because you made a data input mistake or due to the student’s actual life circumstances changing) you MUST ALSO manually change the account listed as the parents! Even changing a student default account, removing the student from all other accounts and anything else… all don’t cause any automatic changes to the account listed as the parents in the student browser!

So, we know which students we are making the appointments for – we’re making appointments for every student currently enrolled in a course. We know which accounts get the appointments FOR those students – the eligible accounts are the ones listed as parents of the student in the student browser. Now, we need to discuss: WHO are the parents meeting, exactly? Which courses will be discussed at the meetings? So by default, appointments will be created for every course in which a student is enrolled… one appointment per course for his parents, and of course, two appointments per course if the parents are divorced and two accounts show up as the student’s parents on the student browser.

So for example, younger students will commonly be enrolled in Limudei Kodesh and General Studies, so the parents will get an appointment with the Limudei kodesh rebbi or morah and an appointment with the general studies teacher.

Let’s get down to business. So, back in our three PTC steps………

We built the structure, and now we are going to create the appointments… so that we can schedule them… starting with mass-creating.

The step we are doing now, MASS APPOINTMENT CREATION (taking the list of possible appointments… with the student in the course… and the parents marked as the parents… and then turning the possible appointments into actual appointments), is a twofold process.

First, we trim-down our list by knocking out unneeded appointments, and then we use the trimmed-down list to actually choose the appointments we want… and create the appointments.

Click on school, parent teacher conferences… and we’ll work our way up from the bottom here. We’ll trim down our list in the appointment not needed screen, and then we’ll move on to the appointments admin screen – that’s where we will REALLY be creating appointments!

First, trimming down the list! Let’s tell Admire who ISN’T getting an appointment! Click on appointments not needed. Select the correct conference name. Bang in the nail with the proffered hammer.

If you click load, you’ll see a listing of every entity that you have set to NOT receive an appointment.

There are none yet, of course.

Let’s put some in.

You can streamline the “appointment not needed” process by using the available entities for exclusions. The system allows you to exclude students from PTC, to exclude entire families – meaning “accounts” – from PTC and to exclude teachers or courses from PTC.

Select the type you wish to exclude from receiving appointments, and pick the account, course, teacher, or student that you want. For the account, you’ll actually search on the standard open account screen; for the others, you’ll select from the list of possible options for this conference. Obviously, even though you’re using the standard account search and you can therefore technically add any account in admire to this appointment not needed list, the only accounts that actually matter here are the ones that are eligible for a PTC appointment.

So, if you exclude an account, no appointment will be created for students on the account.

If you exclude a course, no appointments will be created for students in the course… for that course. Meaning, if the teacher teaches the kid in two different courses, the parents will still get an appointment to meet with that teacher… for the Other course. Now why would you want to exclude a course? Perhaps it’s a very minor course that the school administration simply doesn’t feel warrants parent teacher conference appointments. Or perhaps you’re dealing with older grades where each of the students have a bunch of teachers, and you decide that only certain courses will get appointments because it would just be impossible to fit everyone in otherwise.

Moving on to students, so, in the same way, if you exclude a student, no appointments will be created for that child. The parents will still get appointments for their other children, though.

You can exclude a teacher entirely, as well, if she simply isn’t attending the conferences.

Press load, and you’ll see the excluded entities display.

If you make a mistake and wish to remove an entity, simply right click and select remove.

Now, please realize the following: We are in the middle of PTC step two: creating appointments. But, as we said, this screen – BOTH THE BASIC TAB AND THE ADVANCED TAB THAT WE’ll DISCUSS LATER – are only meant as a trimming down in preparation and aide to the upcoming appointments admin screen, which is where you’ll REALLY create appointments.

So, we can talk about adding or removing an entity to or from the list on this screen – and that will affect whether you’ll be able to create an appointment for the entity, but just realize that ONCE YOU HAVE ACTUALLY “CREATED” an appointment, as we’ll discuss soon, you’ll need to delete the appointment on later screens. You will NOT be able to simply edit this list. Meaning, editing the list here wouldn’t help you, because this whole appointments not needed screen is simply a way to trim down the eligible list… but if the appointment has already been CREATED FOR REAL, then it’s already been created! It doesn’t matter if it’s on the trimmed down eligible list or not – it has an actual appointment, so that all doesn’t matter.. And again, that’s both on the basic tab and on the advanced tab! Once an appointment has been actually created, you need to delete it elsewhere if needed.

Now, the advanced tab is a more powerful way to edit this appointment not needed list.

But… it is important to realize that although the appointment not needed screen – and especially the advanced tab – can be extremely useful (as Every bit of trimming-down and further organization will seriously help you), you do not ABSOLUTELY NEED to use the appointment not needed screen… technically, you can carefully skip over the necessary appointments in the appointments admin screen and not create them.

So therefore, before all of you dear viewers lose patience with me, and in the interest of actually getting to the part of this video where we SCHEDULE THE APPOINTMENTS, we’ll smoothly skip right over the rest of the discussion I wanted to have now about the advanced tab and its surrounding explanations! YIPPEE!! At the end of this video, you’ll find the appointment not needed advanced tab appendix. HOWEVER, please understand that it’s really, really important that you actually watch that appendix later, because the appendix touches on a lot of general scheduling nuances that you really need to know. So really, please make sure you watch it.

 And now, ladies and gentlemen, behold the create appointments screen that we have referenced so many times, called appointments admin.

On this screen, you’ll create appointments on the create appointments tab, and on the next tab, you’ll be able to update appointments.

First, creating appointments.

So, search for the appointments. This screen is not giving you a list of students or accounts… it is listing according to appointment. It’s giving you POSSIBLE APPOINTMENTS TO CREATE, listing all the eligible combinations of accounts, students, teachers and courses that have not been excluded on the appointment not needed screen.

You can filter, of course, to narrow things down, so you can review the data in an organized fashion.

Review all the appointments and create the ones you want to create. If you have properly utilized the appointment not needed screen, you shouldn’t have to search through that many appointments that you don’t wish to create, as the appointment not needed screen should have whittled things down for you considerably.

Now, the easiest way to select most of such a big list, as you may do, is to simply select the ones you DON’T want to create and then invert the selection. Then, to create the appointments, just click “Create appointments.”

If your school is going with PTC setup track two, meaning they have two possible appointment duration options, then before creating the appointments that you want to have the non-default duration, enter the alternate appointment time for them and only then click create.

So select the appointments that are supposed to have the alternate time. Perhaps it’s one teacher’s appointments, because she teaches many courses, or the like, and needs shorter appointments to fit everyone in in a reasonable amount of time. You can auto-select by grade, subject or teacher, to instantly select the ones linked to those entities. Even after auto-selecting, you can click more or unclick some, etc. Then fill in the duration with your alternate duration – remember, you should only use one alternate duration, and you decided how long it would be when we did the setup… it had to meet certain criteria, and so on. Make sure you use that duration that you decided on during setup.   There is no need, though, to select all the appointments that you are giving alternate lengths to at the same time. You can do it in as many batches as you like. Just make sure you’ve selected the correct options here before each time you click create, as you don’t want to mix them up and they don’t automatically clear.

If a teacher teaches two separate courses to the same student, the system automatically creates just one appointment, instead of two. Just be careful on this screen to create the appointments together! Because if you create them separately, the system will make two appointments, one for each of the courses on their own.

As we said earlier in this video, technically, you can make any number of appointment durations, but you would need to MANUALLY schedule them. So if you wish to make many durations, you can update them later when you manually schedule those appointments as we’re saying you need to do, or, if you wish to change those durations here because you find it easier to do so on this streamlined screen, then you can do so, but you must make absolutely sure that you manually schedule them afterwards before running the auto-scheduler or uploading them to parent portal. Just realize that you CANNOT filter which appointments should be touched by the auto-scheduler once you have created the appointment and it already exists.

Notice that the system may post in red: Multiple Accounts found for some students – review results… and you’ll see it has highlighted all appointments for students wherein more than one account is slated for their appointments in this screen. This is a reminder to review those flagged, double accounts. Of course, as we’ve discussed, only accounts marked as parents get appointments, so having more than one account for students is not too common. It happens, of course, if there is an error in the data or if, for example, divorced parents are each getting their own appointments, or at least are getting some appointments each, and you therefore did not mark one of the parents as appointment not needed in the previous screen. Make sure to look through the highlighted appointments to ensure everything is in order and that you select the correct appointments to create, leaving behind any appointments you don’t wish to create.

Now another thing: This pertains to auto-scheduling. The auto-scheduler will of course attempt to place all of a family’s appointments together, so they don’t wait around in between appointments all night. But many schools wish to not only make sure all the family’s appointments are scheduled next to each other, but also to make sure that the parents meet first with all of the teachers for one of their children, and then ALL the teachers for the next child and then all the teachers for the next child. They want the parents to have all the meetings for each particular kid consecutively, before moving on to the next kid’s appointments; they don’t just want a hodgepodge of appointments. In Admire, it would be very impractical to do this for grades where the parents are meeting with more than two teachers total for the child, but for students with a simple Rebbi or Morah and a single general studies teacher – and that’s it… it is very simple to schedule the appointments together.

What you’d do is only schedule one appointment and leave out the other. Later, when we get to the auto-scheduler, I’ll show you how to schedule an automatic break in between all appointments a family has, and they’ll be told to proceed straight to the child’s other teacher after the scheduled appointment. For now, though, simply only schedule the let’s say limudei kodesh appointments and ignore the general studies appointments. Of course, if you already removed the general studies appointments on the previous appointment not needed screen, then great, that’d be even easier.

Another thing you can do on this screen: We mentioned that if you have teachers with children in the school, the system will by default schedule them in for conferences with their own child’s teachers as well, which will force them to interrupt their own conferences. One option we offer is marking teacher accounts as appointment not needed. Or also, obviously, you can just not create their appointments here on the appointment admin screen. Marking it off on the not needed screen makes for good organization of your data, though, so you don’t get confused later. However, if you do want there to be appointments, you have two options: one, you can leave things as is, and the teacher will indeed need to interrupt their class’s PTC to go to their own children’s appointments. (If you do this, just make sure you check how much time that’s adding to the teacher’s evening, because if she has a lot of appointments for the students in the course she teaches, and she is also meeting her own kids’ teachers, you may need to factor that in for the total conference duration in the setup screens… if she ends up being the teacher with longest evening scheduled.) Option number two for if you want there to be appointments for teachers’ kids is to create an appointment only for the parent who is not a teacher!! So let’s say the teacher is a female, and you want the teacher’s husband – the father on the teacher’s account – to attend the appointments for their kids. Select the appointments for their kids, and before clicking create appointments, mark them gender specific Primary m. This will create the appointment only for the primary male individual on the account, and the teacher will not have her appointments interrupted.

If the teacher is a male, of course, and his wife will be attending the conferences, you’d select gender specific primary f, so that HE doesn’t need to interrupt HIS appointments.

You don’t need to worry about these next two checkboxes; generally just make sure this one is not checked off, and this one is. This one is for if you want the students checked off as attending. If your school has students attending their own PTC along with their parents, which is not common, of course (although, ironically, i was in a school that did that, they called it Parent teacher student conferences, actually) anyway, if you want students to attend the appointments, check this box off. The idea is that besides for the appointment subjects including the name of the student that they’re about, the student the appointment is about is technically also marked in the system as an individual on the appointment along with the teacher and parents, but they are by default marked as not attending (attending = false). So here, you can actually make them be marked as attending, if you wish. This is relevant for reports of appointment times and schedules, as we’ll explore later.

This one is asking if you wish to create primary individuals. As we mentioned at the beginning of this video, you need individuals on the relevant accounts for the appointments to work properly. Checking this off ensures that accounts without the necessary individuals have the needed individuals created on the spot when the appointment is created. Unless your organization has some interesting way of using Admire individuals, just make sure to always leave this checked off, because it basically can’t hurt to add the individual, usually – and the system will not add individuals if there already are a male and female primary individuals on the account.

Also, don’t create some appointments now and then use the auto-scheduler to schedule them and then come back to create more that you then plan on using the auto-scheduler for again. The auto-scheduler is not capable of keeping appointments from one family clustered close to each other if the appointments are split between runs of the auto-scheduler. So you want to make sure you get all appointments created before running the scheduler.

Now that you’ve created appointments, they’ll vanish from the list here and be visible on the update appointments tab, because they already exist.

Now, let’s discuss the update appointments tab. Once your appointments are created, you can use the update appointments screen to modify existing appointments. You can filter and select and so on, of course.

Notice the information provided here, the full number of records pulled, the amount out of those that you have selected on the screen, the number of visible appointments that are scheduled and the number that have not been scheduled yet.

Once you select whichever appointments you plan on updating, you can select the appropriate update here. Let’s review the available updates, because they are not precisely the same as the adjustments you can make on the previous tab, when creating the appointments for the first time.

So, you can change the appointment duration if you wish, regardless of whether it currently has the default duration or not, but remember to make sure you aren’t adding more durations than allowed by your setup track. So in setup track one, which offered only one appointment duration, you wouldn’t really use this at all.

The next one is interesting, because it doesn’t have to do with the appointment itself; it actually has to do with the scheduling, which is not done on this screen… but basically, you can use this option to unschedule appointments that have already been scheduled.

You can unschedule all selected appointments, or choose that even though the system is only unscheduling appointments you’ve selected here, it should only process and unschedule the ones that were auto-scheduled. This is useful for if you ran into an issue with the auto-scheduler and now wish to try again. Because obviously it’s complex to manually choose the ones that the auto-scheduler already touched.

Notice that the option is called “only auto-CREATED” which is a misnomer and means only auto-SCHEDULED.

You can also select delete if you wish to delete appointments. This actually deletes them. They are then back in the status of “not created yet” and they’ll appear on the create appointments tab to be created anew if you wish.

If you need to change an appointment from or to being gender specific, or you want to change whether the student is attending or not, you’d delete the appointment and then re-create it properly on the previous “create appointments tab.” In those two cases, you can also manually adjust which individuals are coming on later screens. 

Once all appointments are properly created, you can move on to step three in PTC – you are ready to move on to the actual scheduling of the appointments. Just before we schedule them, though… you may need to block out time for certain teachers… if, for instance, the teacher needs to come late or leave early or leave in the middle for a while. As mentioned towards the beginning of this video, this is done by actually creating a special new quote-unquote appointment for the teacher… scheduled for the time they’ll be unavailable – which will ensure that neither the scheduler, nor you manually, will mistakenly schedule that teacher an appointment during the time when they are unavailable without realizing.

You may also IN GENERAL wish to create an appointment for someone who wouldn’t really be supposed to be in the conferences. For instance: an account on which the student is an individual but that isn’t eligible for a mass-created conference because the account is not marked as the parents of the student, or… well, let’s say you want to make an appt with an alumnus to meet his old rebbi during ptc,   but you want to make sure the appointment can fit into a proper slot so everything runs smoothly… or any other case or reason.

So whether you’re adding a special appointment for a teacher to be unavailable or you’re adding a real appointment, the process is the same. Go to the account list screen and click new appointment. Add the person or people you wish. These options are simply there to ease your search for the desired individual. If a particular individual is added, then they are added; it doesn’t matter how you searched for them. So anyway, add the person or people that you wish. If it’s a teacher unavailable appointment, you can add all the teachers to whom it applies at once, of course; you don’t need to make a separate appointment for each one: just mark them all as participants. Make sure you label the appointment as “busy” so you remember what it’s for. You can save – and then come back to edit it later, if you’re not sure of the timing yet, or you can just schedule the appointment now. Special appointments CANNOT be scheduled via the auto-scheduler and must be manually scheduled, however.

To schedule the appointment now, click save and reload. You’ll see the system update with the appointment information. Right click where you want the appointment to be scheduled and click schedule. The appointment pops up scheduled in its own little bubble. The timeline here adjusts according to the total conference duration, so you may find these bubbles small or hard to work with if the duration is long. Just use these arrows to sort of zoom-in on the timeline for easier viewing. Now, hover the cursor over the appointment bubble. You’ll see the timing and scheduling information displayed here, and you can manually lengthen or shorten the appointment by expanding or shrinking the bubble with your mouse, and you can change the scheduled time by clicking on the appointment bubble and dragging the bubble with your mouse. Notice this teeny-tiny little arrow on top here that will help you adjust the bubble precisely.

Now, it is extremely important to make sure that the appointment – whether it’s a teacher unavailable “appointment,” or a real new appointment – does not mess up your carefully inputted appointment intervals!! If you don’t make sure the intervals are honored, you will waste time from the PTC evening, possibly even not allowing for all appointments to have time to be scheduled… and worse than that – if you’re using the auto-scheduler, you will likely cause it to take a very long time for its computer-mind to process and think, and/or for the entire auto-scheduler to even simply malfunction. So make sure you honor the intervals. That means the following: You can make the appointment any custom length you wish. You’ll notice that it is by default created at the default appointment duration you entered in the first setup screen. But you can adjust it to be any custom length. However, it should start and end precisely to the second according to the appointment interval.

In addition to the tiny arrow, which can be very helpful, if you double-click on the bubble (after it’s created), it will snap the appointment to the nearest minute – and you can use that, as well, to assist you.

So, it should ALWAYS begin at the beginning of an interval and then, if you used setup track one and left a lull in between appointments, you can do the same here, so either have it end at an interval or one minute or so before if that’s what you’ve been doing.

To clarify, there is no list of appointment intervals. You need to calculate it for the manual appointments.

When you’re done, make sure you always click save.

Before we move on to mass-scheduling, I want to quickly go over the main options on these two screens so that you’ll be familiar with them. I’m just going to touch upon the different options without really going into detail; it would be worth your while to familiarize yourself with them.

So, the account list screen and the view schedule screen. On the account list screen, you can see a list of all the accounts eligible for regular standard mass-created appointments. You can search or filter and then search. You can reorganize the screen if you wish, of course, and search the columns, and so on. You can click the plus sign to expand the account’s appointments. This will only show standard appointments. Entities marked as no appointment needed will show up in red, whether that’s the account as a whole or the student, etc.

Appointment quantity refers to the number of standard appointments   NOT marked as no appointment needed. Has appointment refers to the number of standard appointments that have already been created. And Scheduled refers, of course, to the number of appointments scheduled. You’ll get a count in each column for the account as a whole and a count for each appointment itself.

You can click edit if you wish to manually adjust or schedule the appointments on that account. On the screen that opens, you’ll see the account information and the appointments. You can view or add PTC notes here which you can use for filtering and can view on select screens such as here and here. You’ll be able to adjust whether the account should be marked as appointment not needed or not – remember that this won’t delete appointments that have already been created, even if they haven’t yet been scheduled.

You’ll see a list of standard appointments eligible for creation that HAVE NOT BEEN CREATED YET. You can select from the list and click “create” to create appointments right here on this screen, just as you can do on a mass scale on the appointments admin screen. Unlike on the appointments admin mass screen where it would have gotten too messy, here, you can create an appointment even for entities marked as no appointment, but the system will first prompt you with a reminder.

You can edit which individuals are attending the appointments and if you right-click, you’ll even get the full right-click menu for individuals that you get on accounts themselves.

On the bottom half of the screen, you can manually adjust the grid, and the appointment times and durations, as we showed before on a similar screen. Use the tiny arrow – and the double-click – to assist you in the very important task of heeding the appointment intervals as you manually adjust.

Yellow indicates that the appointment still needs to be scheduled, and white indicates that it has already been scheduled.

The grid will indicate when times are unavailable due to there being other appointments scheduled then with the teacher. You can click the plus sign to expand the appointments and see exactly who has what busy-ness and where you may wish to edit and adjust things if needed.

If it is an individual on the account who is busy, you’ll just see the appointment in the list of appointments here. The timeline will show you the entire timeline together for this account and indicate clearly if there is any overlap by shading in overlapping times. Again, you can click the plus sign to expand and check which precise individual is overlapping with which.

This screen is not complex to use, but as I said, familiarizing yourself well with this screen will benefit you and give you more control of your data.

Now, the view schedule screen. The view schedule screen does not show you a schedule for the whole conference. NO WAIT< actually, IT DOES.JUST MIGHT CRASH OR BE SLOW.You’d need to pull the relevant reports for that as will be explained at the end of this video. The view schedule screen is used on an account level. You search for the account (you can use these as in other Admire screens if that helps you), then you click enter, and then use the screen in much the same way, on the whole, as the account list we just finished with. It would be worthwhile to familiarize yourself with this screen, as well, though, because there are some differences between the account list screen and this screen.

Now note that you can’t make new non-standard appointments on the view schedule screen. Interestingly, though, whereas the account list screen will only show accounts that are eligible for standard appointments even though it lets you create new non-standard appointments… the view schedule screen will allow you to search FOR ANY account, and will therefore show even non-standard accounts and their appointments… even though you can’t create such     appointments on this screen itself.

Back to where we were up to… we were just discussing blocking off time when particular teachers may be unavailable before we got onto this tangent about all non-mass appointment creation and editing. So now that you have all your standard appointments created, mark off teachers who need special “busy” appointments, if needed, and then schedule or create and then schedule any appointment that you need to schedule manually for any reason.

Then, unless you plan on slowly scheduling every single appointment manually, you are ready to mass-schedule via either the auto-scheduler or allowing parents to choose times on the parent portal.

To use the auto-scheduler, go to the report wizard. Click on updates. Select the ptc auto-scheduler. You must create a filter to select the proper conference. You should just create a prompt filter so you can just create it once and then reuse it each season. You can copy exactly what I’m doing now to create your own reusable filter. Click new. Type in the name. Click the basic filter tab. Select the only entity available: Parent Teacher Conferences. Type in the field name: Conference name. Right click on the next box. On the build screen, on the prompt line, check off the choices option (which will give you a dropdown to select the right name every time you use this filter), and then name the prompt… we’ll name it: Conference name.

Now you can always use this filter to run the auto-scheduler every time you have ptc.

Keep in mind that this step in the process is not the time to filter which particular appointments should be auto-scheduled. You cannot filter out specific appointments here.

Click update and then click okay when it warns you that it is about to update your files.

This mini screen then pops up. On this screen, you’ll tell the system the minimum amount of time it needs to wait between every account’s appointments. This is not a break for teachers. This is a break for the parents themselves between each of their appointments.

You’ll also fill out the preferred – and the actual – maximum amount of time the parent can wait in between appointments, so the system doesn’t schedule the account’s appointments spread out throughout the evening, forcing parents to stay on campus for hours.

We’ll discuss the schedule part checkbox shortly.

Now, just understand that you can’t make the system give every parent a precise break. The system needs to make sure that all the appointments fit in the best possible way, and obviously not everyone will get the best possible combination of times. It’s simply not possible. However, this screen sets the minimum, the preferred maximum and the actual maximum – because even if the auto-scheduler can’t work out something better, you likely don’t want a set of parents waiting two hours between appointments as that simply wouldn’t be acceptable. So you’d likely rather simply not schedule them, or work something out on your own, than allow a two hour break…

So here’s how it works. You can give parents no time in between appointments. Perhaps they’d prefer that. Or you can give them in-between time… but the auto-scheduler only allows in between time to be scheduled in increments of the appointment interval you selected back in the setup screen.

Here’s how you fill this screen in. It’s tricky, and it’s not intuitive, so bear with me.

One means no time in between appointments. Two means a space of one appointment interval in between appointments. Three means a space of two appointment intervals in between appointments. Four means a space of three appointment intervals in between appointments. And so on. So, in the minimum, you’ll put in at least one, and if you wish to ensure a break, you can put a higher number in; you can put a two, or a three or whatever you choose.

Then fill in the maximum preferred break to tell the system that it is preferable not to give more than that break length if possible. And then fill in the actual maximum, which, as we said, is really the cutoff… it says that even if it doesn’t work, you simply can’t have a break longer than the maximum.

So, if you put in, for instance, 2 in the minimum, 4 in the preferred maximum, and 6 in the maximum, and your interval on the setup screen was 5, then in between each appointment, parents will have at least a five minute break, the system will attempt to ensure that the break does not exceed fifteen minutes, and the system will not allow the break to exceed twenty-five minutes, and will simply leave the appointments that don’t work unscheduled.

Keep in mind, of course, that if you used setup track one, and you have a longer appointment interval than your appointment duration, for instance if appointment duration is 5 and the interval is 6 – then technically the break is even slightly longer than the break you insert here, because the parent’s break won’t start until the end of the interval. So if you have five minute duration and six minute interval, then after the five minute appointment, there’s a one minute break for everyone – parents and teachers… to wait for the interval to end, and then the parent’s breaks start…

Now, you can put in whatever you choose. Many schools put in one, two three – so if the intervals, again, are five, then one two three allows back to back appointments, and at least preferably not more than a five minute break in between appointments, and a maximum break of ten minutes (besides, as we said, for any additional minutes due to having chosen setup track one).

Before we move on, I’ll explain the function of the “schedule part” checkbox. So, the system will automatically schedule the appointments it can, and leave over the ones it couldn’t fit, if there are any.

If you check off “schedule part,” the system will even schedule some of an account’s appointments and leave out others, if that’s what works out. If you want the system to only schedule appointments for an account if it can manage to schedule all the account’s appointments during the auto-schedule run, then leave this box unchecked. Do what works for your organization, of course, but realize that if you check this box, allowing partial account scheduling, you may be stuck with a few account appointments left over that can’t fit anywhere near their scheduled appointments.

One last thing here: We mentioned that if you wish to make sure that each of the family’s kid’s appointments are scheduled next to each other, so the parents have all the meetings for each particular kid consecutively, before moving on to the next kid’s appointments, you simply don’t create the general studies appointments, and you tell parents to proceed from the limudei kodesh appointment to the general studies appointment. And then you need to make sure that you give parents a break of at least one interval, if not more, to make time for the general studies appointment. SO you’ll use at least a two in the minimum box.

When you have completed this mini-screen, the system will then present you the prompt you created earlier. Choose the correct conference name from the dropdown.

Then the system will think.

Sometimes this merely takes a few seconds, and sometimes it takes a little while, but when it’s finished creating a scheduling plan, it will prompt for confirmation that it is about to update x amount of appointments (which it refers to as rows; don’t ask me why).

Click to confirm, and the system will schedule all the appointments and proudly announce that it has done so.

Now, to check if everything worked out properly, go to the account list screen, select the correct conference, and click search. You’ll see immediately on the bottom if any appointments are unscheduled. If any are indeed unscheduled, type in one in the header row by has apt and 0 by scheduled. This will bring up the accounts with appointments that are not scheduled. Double click on the account and check the schedule grid to see if you can figure out why the appointment was not scheduled. Possible reasons might include that the conference length in the setup screen was not long enough or that the maximum break in the pop-up on the auto-scheduler was too small, and it wasn’t possible for the computer to schedule the appointments with such a small amount of time between the appointments for the family.

Now you can make the relevant changes and then try the auto-scheduler again, or you can manually schedule the appointments, if you wish, by double-clicking on the account to get to the schedule grid and right clicking to schedule the appointment where you wish, as we discussed earlier.

If you want to try the auto-scheduler again, then – if you had the schedule part box unchecked when you ran the auto-scheduler before, you can simply run the auto-scheduler again now after having made the necessary changes in the settings. So run the auto-scheduler and then check again in the account list screen if every appointment has been scheduled properly.

If, however, you had the schedule part box checked, and you see that indeed some of your unscheduled appointments at this point belong to accounts that had some of their appointments scheduled when you ran the auto-scheduler, then you should first unschedule all the appointments you have already scheduled and run the whole auto-scheduler again for everyone… this is because, as mentioned earlier, the auto-scheduler is not capable of keeping family appointments together in different runs. So you need to unschedule the ones that have already been scheduled and redo them all at once together.

Go to the appointments admin screen to mass-unschedule all the appointments. Select the correct conference and click search. Select all and then unschedule the auto-scheduled ones. (Remember that it’s called auto-created, which is a misnomer and really means auto-scheduled.) In this case, you only want to unschedule the auto-scheduled appointments, because if the appointment has been scheduled manually by you, you presumably need it to stay scheduled.

After unscheduling the appointments, re-run the auto-scheduler and then check again if every appointment has been scheduled properly.

Now, as we mentioned before, besides for manually scheduling each appointment tediously on your own, there is also another option besides auto-scheduling which a lot of schools utilize: allowing the parents themselves to pick appointment times on the parent portal. From the parents’ end, the process is self-explanatory, you just let them know to pick out the times, and they can easily schedule. And it’s pretty simple for you, as well. I’ll give a quick overview, but first let me be clear: you can only use the parent portal parent scheduling option if you are using setup track two; it cannot be used in track one, where the interval can be longer than the appointment. That won’t work.

So go to the parent portal menu on the taskbar. Click on PTC. Select the conference name. If you click load, you’ll see a list of all created appointments and their information. If you need to delete any of them or some aren’t showing up, you’ll deal with that back in the appointment admin and other screens. Not here. Now click upload conference. DO NOT SCHEDULE APPOINTMENTS YOURSELF ONCE YOU HAVE CLICKED LOAD, UNTIL YOU DEACTIVATE THE CONFERENCE. When you’re ready, perhaps in a week or so, to import the times, take the conference offline, deactivate the conference, import the data and check for conflicts.

Once you have all your appointments scheduled, you’ll want to run the appropriate reports to post or hand-out or email, etc.

These are the ones you should use: In Report Wizard, you’ll find three useful reports: Report number one, appointment list by attendee for ptc – this report lists every Admire individual who is attending ptc along with all their appointments and scheduled times, whether the individual is a student, parent, teacher or other Admire individual. You can hand this report out to everyone as they come – it cannot be emailed en masse to the account email address, however; that would be custom work. This can be a useful list to hang up – perhaps print this list for all the teachers and then hang each one outside of the room where each respective teacher is holding meetings… the list will serve as a clear list of each appointment with this teacher in order of the time. Also, this is the only report that includes irregular appointment times and details, the other reports and reminder letters to parents, all include only regular appointments – meaning: only the appointments that the system allowed you to create when mass-creating, not appointments you decided to create on the account list screen by clicking on new appointment.

Report number two – appointment list by student which lists every student and the times of the appointments about them

And report number three is appointment list by course, which is organized by course – it lists every course, the teacher’s name, the students’ names, the parents’ names and the appointment times.

You do not need to filter on any of those three reports unless you specifically wish to, because a built-in pop-up will ask you what Parent Teacher Conference it should pull information for.

These three reports can be exported as spreadsheets, as well, but export format is presumably not as helpful for PTC… if you do use the exports, though, just a heads-up: the exports have a column that claims to list the appointment times but does not list them in the preview. So, just don’t worry about it, once you export it to excel, the times will show up properly.

Now, you also may wish to send reminder mailings or emails to parents about PTC. You can use the “appointment reminder letter for ptc” ON MAIL MERGE. Keep in mind that this merge’s letter’s wording will not automatically be updated for each family depending upon if you adjusted the individuals attending, or the like. The merge will simply send a standardized letter to every account with a regular PTC appointment… detailing the times of the various scheduled appointments. You can edit the template if you wish. This is not complex, but is beyond the scope of this video. If this is relevant, and you aren’t yet familiar enough with Mail Merge options and functions, please discuss with your Admire consultant. You can also manually edit any or all specific letters – on Microsoft Word for instance – if needed. Again, discuss with your Admire consultant.

If you wish to email the reminder to each account that is attending, you can use advisor, the automated report service. And you can split to the email fields on this one. Again, please discuss with your Admire consultant for further instructions, if needed. And remember, if you need to make edits while using Advisor, you’ll need to edit specifically the DEFAULT template for the merge.

Remember to make a note on the template (and specifically the DEFAULT template, if using advisor) if you chose the option to leave general studies appointments unscheduled, and you want to let parents know that their general studies appointments will follow their limudei kodesh appointments.

Let’s end with a super-quick review of the screens: First you set up the structure here, then you start the process of creating appointments you tell the system which eligible accounts do not need appointments and then go ahead and mass-create appointments and edit them if you need, then you start the scheduling process by first adding and scheduling any unavailable time for teachers and any appointments that need to be manually created… and then you continue the scheduling process by manually scheduling any appointments that need manual scheduling for any reason… all on these two screens here, and then you mass-schedule – you either upload and eventually import to and from parent portal here… or auto-schedule here – and then you check back here if you have any issues with the auto-scheduler, and finally you create the reports and merges you need and then wait excitedly for the ptc evening and watch how smoothly it all runs thanks to your careful scheduling on admire!

Well, happy conferencing!

See you next time!

APPENDIX – Appointments not needed, advanced tab

Let’s get back into the appointment not needed portion of ptc. So, as we know, after setting up the ptc structure, and before actually creating appointments from the list of possible appointments, we need to trim down that list to make things more manageable… we need to remove accounts or courses, and so on, that are not going to get appointments – so that when we create appointments on the appointments admin screen, we don’t need to start looking through all the details of every appointment to see if we want to create it.

This eases the process.

In the appointments not needed screen, we can use the basic tab to remove various entities, as was discussed in the main video. The advanced tab, which is the topic of this appendix, is much more powerful and can be even more useful. It is a mass update screen for appointments needed or unneeded.

Let’s take a look.

Start with pulling the relevant list.

The advanced tab offers four filterable lists: Account, course, student and teacher.

Now what are these lists? They’re lists of accounts, courses, students and teachers that the system thinks you may wish to give appointments to.

So, you can choose how to view the data in this screen. You can pull a list of accounts on which the student is an individual – so that you can exclude the accounts you wish to exclude, you can pull a list of every course whose students are eligible for appointments so that you can exclude specific courses from PTC, you can pull a list of every student who can get an appointment so that you can exclude them and a list of every teacher whose students can get appointments so that you can exclude specific teachers.

Remember, the relevant lists will show up here in full whether some entities already have appointments created for themselves on the appointment admin screen, or not.

So search for the list you want. Like many other admire screens that contain expandable hidden data columns, you can expand the hidden account id column here to help you easily and quickly find any accounts you need to check or edit. Or the student id column here, and so on.

Now, you’ll see anyone already marked as no appointment needed will have a little red x next to them.

So, select anyone you wish to mark as appointment not needed, and select no appointment.

Then make sure to click process, and they will update accordingly.

You can also select “need appointment” to change an entity that you already marked as not getting an appointment… back to getting an appointment.

That’s especially useful   when you accidentally add a lot of entities to the appointment not needed list and wish to remove them so they can have appointments created. Removing them all on the basic tab is tedious, because each entity needs to be right-clicked by itself. Here, however, you can select the ones you need and change them all at once by clicking these buttons.

Now, while on this appointment not needed screen, on either tab, think carefully about whether a particular teacher is not coming, or a certain course – perhaps a very minor subject, as we discussed before – is not getting appointments. Or if students or accounts – meaning families – in general may not be coming.

You can also filter for which particular accounts or courses and so on should show up here on this list.

For instance, if there are scheduling complications with a lot of the -Toms River- parents and you want to be able to scroll through them for easy updating without having to scroll through hundreds of other accounts, you can filter for a default address with a city name of -Toms River- on the accounts shown, or as I’ve done here, you can create a default address prompt on the filter and type in the desired city.

Of course, this is even more useful when you have a very large school and every bit of data organization really makes things easier.

Now, the filter in and of itself won’t change anything in the system; you’ll still need to select the entities and mark them with the x’s of course. The filter will just give you more organized precision data so you can review the data easily. So if you aren’t a filtering expert yet, don’t worry. You can still do everything you need to do for PTC by scrolling through the lists here and marking off the various entities. And of course, as mentioned before, you can organize quite a lot on these lists even without filters. But please stay tuned for future videos which will discuss filtering in-depth – because once you master filters, your entire Admire experience - in all the modules and screens – will change… and you’ll have real control of your data.

Let’s talk a little more about filters here. First a tip: When you’re filtering for having or not having PTC appointments, remember to include which conference you are referring to in the filter!

Here are a few more common filters you may wish to use: You may wish to filter for the accounts of students with divorced parents, because by default, both parents will be slated to receive separate appointments; if that is not the plan, you can change those here and select which of the parents will be receiving an appointment.

Please note about divorced parents: As we’ve said, this whole screen is only the first step. This “appointments not needed” screen simply removes various possible appointments in order to make things more organized. However, we will still need to actually create the appointments in the appointments admin screen. So if a pair of divorced parents are splitting the appointments, for instance, the father is going to the limudei kodesh appointments and the mother is going to the general studies appointments, don’t edit anything on this screen. In the next screen, you’ll be able to select – actual appointment by actual appointment – which to create. So you’ll create, for instance, all the limudei kodesh appointments available for the student – but only the ones with the father’s account listed – not the mother’s… and you’ll just leave the mother’s appointments uncreated. And then you’ll create all the general studies appointments available for the student – but only the ones with the mother’s account listed – not the father’s… and you’ll just leave the father’s appointments uncreated.

Another thing: If you have teachers in the school who are also parents of students, and you don’t want the teachers to need to pause their class’s appointments to meet their kids’ teachers, you can filter for those teacher’s accounts and mark them as not getting an appointment. DO NOT EXCLUDE THE TEACHER AS A TEACHER ON THE TEACHER LIST – NOT HERE AND NOT ON THE BASIC TAB!! That would mean that she is receiving no appointments as a teacher and would disable all appointments for any course she teaches! Only mark her account, on the account list, as no appointment needed!

Again, as we said with divorce, if you don’t wish to actually exclude the appointments, but rather to modify them in a workable way – by the divorce that meant creating some appointments for the father and some for the mother, and here it would likely mean to have the system create the teacher’s kids’ appointments only for her husband who is available to come to the conferences, but not for her so she doesn’t need to interrupt her own courses appointments, you’d again wait for the appointments admin screen where you can actually select which gender will receive an appointment.

So again, the appointments admin screen is a more powerful screen that has very relevant options to choose and this is simply the lead-up, trim-down screen to make things easier. You can exclude accounts, students, courses and teachers here, but you can’t really modify things too precisely until the appointments admin screen.

We’ll end by repeating two important points that were already discussed in the main video.

One, when auto-scheduling, the auto-scheduler will of course attempt to place all of a family’s appointments together, so they don’t wait around in between appointments all night. But many schools wish to not only make sure all the family’s appointments are scheduled next to each other, but also to make sure that the parents meet first with all of the teachers for one of their children, and then ALL the teachers for the next child and then all the teachers for the next child. They want the parents to have all the meetings for each particular kid consecutively, before moving on to the next kid’s appointments; they don’t just want a hodgepodge of appointments. In Admire, it would be very impractical to do this for grades where the parents are meeting with more than two teachers total for the child, but for students with a simple Rebbi or Morah and a single general studies teacher – and that’s it… it is very simple to schedule the appointments together.

What you’d do is only schedule one appointment and leave out the other. Later, when you get to the auto-scheduler, as shown in the main video earlier, you’ll schedule an automatic break in between all appointments a family has, and they’ll be told to proceed straight to the child’s other teacher after the scheduled appointment.

The second point we’ll repeat here – and then we’ll say goodbye – is this:

Both the basic tab and the advanced tab of the appointment not needed screen are only meant as a trimming down in preparation and aide to the appointments admin screen, which is where you’ll really CREATE appointments.

So, we discussed – at length – adding or removing an entity to or from the list on this screen, but it is integral to realize that ONCE YOU HAVE ACTUALLY “CREATED” an appointment in the appointment admin screen, then you’ll need to delete the appointment on later screens if needed. You will NOT be able to simply edit the relevant entity on THIS appointment not needed screen. Editing the list here wouldn’t help you, because this whole appointments not needed screen is simply a way to trim down the eligible list… but if the appointment has already been CREATED FOR REAL, then it’s already been created! It doesn’t matter if it’s on the trimmed down eligible list or not – it has an actual appointment, so that all doesn’t matter.

Good-bye for now!

Extra sub-sub-sub-sub-appendix:

Let me first summarize the rather disingenuous words I reluctantly stated in the appendix:

I mentioned that the appointment not needed screen advanced tab offers four filterable lists: Account, course, student and teacher. That’s fully true, of course.

I then said that these lists are really lists of accounts, courses, students and teachers that the system thinks you may wish to give appointments to.

The only thing is, that is not strictly true! Well, it’s true for the course, student and teacher lists on this screen, but it isn’t true for the account list here. The system doesn’t really think you may wish to give appointments to all the people on the account list – and not only because Admire software has still not achieved full sentience!

In reality, the account list here is a little funny.

Let me explain. So, we know that accounts listed in the student browser as PARENTS of a student enrolled in a course… are the only accounts eligible for PTC appointments.

But due to various technicalities, the screen is not set up to specifically display accounts marked as parents. Instead, if you search for accounts here, you’ll get a list of every account on which the student is listed as an individual. Now, in the vast majority of cases, students are individuals on ONE account, that account is listed as their parents on their page in the student browser, and everything works out fine. But sometimes, a student will be on an account without it being listed as his parents’ – and that will make the account show up here even though it’s not actually eligible for an appointment at all… and sometimes, the student will not be on a particular account, but the account will be listed as the student’s parents and the account will therefore be eligible for an appointment… and will not show up here, because the student isn’t on the account.

So if you notice the list acting up, it just may be helpful to understand this quirk.

Now, practically, for the non-eligible accounts that show up – it doesn’t matter, they can get marked… or not… you can ignore them. Just make sure you aren’t confused later if you don’t find the necessary appointment options on the appointments admin screen – because you may remember seeing it here and leaving it as appointment needed… and you may not realize that actually they were never eligible for an appointment at all and need to have their “parent” listing edited on the student browser.

On the flip side, if you need to actually mark the account as “appointment not needed,” or unmark it, you’ll need to do it manually in the basic tab. You won’t be able to even see the account in the advanced tab at all. (The basic tab, on the other hand, does not even pull from a list of relevant accounts; it simply pulls the entire list of Admire accounts together, so it will work.)

Most importantly, just realize that this whole issue does not apply on the appointment admin screen where you’ll create actual appointments after finishing with the “appointment not needed” screen. The correct lists of possible appointments will show up there (trimmed down, of course, by whatever you trim in this appointments not needed screen).