For this installment of What Works Wednesday, I want to share a site I recently had a chance to use. I previously mentioned that we have conferences when we get back from break. We had to do things differently for this one. Usually we have time slots twenty minutes apart for nine hours of conferences. When we decided to add a student day (make-up) to that morning, shortening the amount of conferences slots we had to scramble. Grade levels could do twenty minute slots, or fifteen. My grade level chose to do fifteen minute slots. We could also invite a minimum of eighteen parents. Then we had to schedule our own conferences. After the last minute decision, our tech guy sent a link to Sign Up Genius.
Sign Up Genius is just that, genius! I was able to register and set up my conference slots in the matter of minutes on Friday afternoon. I set the link to my parents through a newsletter, Remind 101 message, and a link on my web page. Within 15 minutes of dismissal, I had my first conference assigned. By the end of the weekend, over half had signed up. I got three conference slips I had to enter, and confer with colleagues. By Tuesday, all but three of my twenty-four students had conference slots. The last three (three I need to see) were finally scheduled. Twenty-four of twenty-four students scheduled.
Parents loved they could get the slot they wanted. They just needed to fill in their name on the slot and give an email that will send a confirmation and a reminder. Easy peasy!
It took the responsibility of coordinating conferences from the office and placed it in the hands of parents. It is their job to make sure times don't overlap. The one downfall I see is that the Special Ed. staff weren't able to use this, so they may have overlapping time slots. When we have to schedule our own conferences in the future, the Special Ed. teachers should schedule theirs, and then plug them into homeroom time slots.
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| Partial schedule only |
Sign up genius could be used in many ways. You could schedule snacks, parent volunteers, etc. I think it has merit as a useful, time saving site. I will let you know if this worked out as planned. I am on vacation this week. I will read blogs, but with this post scheduled in advance, I don't know if I will be blogging myself during the break. For those of you on break, enjoy!
