hi my name is ceti and welcome back to the channel where we make educational technology easy for you in today's video we're going to be going into our google calendar and i'm going to show you all you need to know about the new appointment scheduling feature now this is a way that you can set out blocks of time and have people schedule appointments with you now i know you're saying okay maybe we already had that it was called appointment slots well this one is much much better now if you've seen this in my previous video this will be a deep dive into this new feature and if you're brand new to it let's get started by opening up our google calendar now here i'm in my google calendar and by default everything is still set to use appointment slots so let me show you what the old version looks like first and then we'll show you the new version now in the previous version of this feature you are able to select a chunk of time and then here under appointment slots create those individual slots that people can book you can select their duration let's say that you want to have slots of 15 minutes and then you clicked on save this would then create a booking page or an appointment page and this is what you would share with parents or students allowing them to book in a time slot as you can see it's not very user friendly it looked very messy bulky now clearly i'm not the only one that was thinking this because google has completely redesigned this and created a appointment schedule feature so that's the key difference these are the appointment slots we want to be using appointment schedules now where do i find these because whenever i'm selecting time here i don't have it as an option and that is because you have to first activate this in your settings so we're going to open up our calendar settings click on that settings menu settings now we're going to scroll down or here on the left hand side and we can select appointment schedules this is a feature that is going to replace the old appointment slots so in order to use this go ahead and tick the box right here create appointment schedules instead of appointment slots that setting has been saved we can now safely go back to our calendar let's do the same thing now but let's create appointment schedules i'm going to again select a chunk of time let's select this block here and now instead of slots we have those schedules here now you will notice that these look different you can see here it says okay add a new appointment schedule we have to create that on a separate page so let's just call this check in with myself there we go and we are going to click on continue and now we get so many more options that we can tweak to make this booking page a personalized page that works for us so the first thing is how long are your various appointments going to be well i'm going to make them 15 minutes now we can't go lower than 15 15 is the minimum so hopefully that is something that will change because we do sometimes have five minute or ten minute check-ins at the moment it's set to 15 so i'm going to select 15 and then we have sort of our availability so do we want to be available on more than just one day if you do want to do that then you can always click on that plus icon here and you can add an additional period so here for example on monday i'll be available from nine till let's say 12 p.m so we're going to select that and then on thursday we leave it as we've selected on our calendar i'm going to scroll down now we have some options about the scheduling window and this is important because maybe you do not want to make this available yet maybe you have parent consultations and you want everyone to be able to schedule in their appointments starting from the same time so for example we open our parent consultation booking wednesday at 1pm and we can set that up here so for example if i select start and end dates i can say when this opens up and when it ends so the people have a limited booking window to sign up for an appointment i'm going to cancel that for now i am going to change this to the maximum time in advance i don't want people to book 60 days in advance let's say okay we can book about 20 days in advance and the minimum time before the appointment i want to get sort of a couple of hours to prepare myself so i want them to book at least 12 hours before the actual appointment now here under adjusted availability you can have exceptions so let's say that you have a holiday well you can always click on change the dates availability so for example here we have this monday and thursday but i don't want to be available monday the 25th so i'm going to just change that i'm on a holiday so we're going to change the monday to 25th availability i'm going to say that i am unavailable all day long and so we can add that in we can have our holidays added as well scrolling down we have our booking appointment settings and this is an important one especially for consultations to add in a buffer time and this is the buffer time in between the different appointments so here let's add in a buffer time of let's say five minutes let's give ourselves five minutes between each appointment and then also have a maximum number of bookings per day i'm not going to set this up but you could limit yourself to say maximum five people a day i don't see more than five or maybe 10 or 20 it's completely up to you you can set that up here the color is just the color that this event will have on your calendar so if you wanted to choose green for example then all those appointment schedules on your calendar will show up in that green color let's go ahead and click on next and now we're talking more about what it will look like so here we have our booking page photo and name do you want to display that or do we want to change that this is what it will look like at the moment i'm okay with that this is a demo account this is what it will display you can also add in a location or conferencing let's say that these are virtual meetings well let's go ahead and select google meet this will then automatically create a google meeting for each individual appointment that has been booked we can add in a description this could be a reminder of what you expect people to bring or what you would like them to have available with them for that meeting or maybe just a quick little description of what that appointment is all about and then we have our booking form now the booking form by default will have three questions first name surname and then also their email address you can add in additional questions and this will be filled out by people as they are booking an appointment so for example if it's a parent consultation maybe you also want to add in the name of the child and that child's class now at the moment we have a maximum of four questions that are asked and so we can't add in both the year group and the student unless we of course change this and say year group and student name there we go save that and then parents will be prompted to fill this out we can scroll down and we can also set up our booking confirmations and reminders this will work similar to the invitations and reminders of google calendar in general so we can have a email reminder one day before and then we can add another reminder 10 minutes before so let's say that that reminder one day before it's a bit much maybe let's change that and let's remind them three days before and then again 30 minutes before that way they get a email three days ahead of time and then another one 30 minutes before the meeting is going to take place let's go ahead and click on save and this has now been set up so as you can see here we can still tweak it afterwards we can click on that little pencil symbol to tweak it change it or we can click on the open booking page and as you can see from this booking page the interface of appointment schedules is much more user friendly we have our different days that we are available here on the calendar we can switch between these as you can see and we can book these various time slots taking into consideration that buffer time we've set up so let's say that i want to book in this 10 a.m i would click on that and then i get those four questions that i've set up as individual items so you can see here first name last name email address and then year group and student name and so parents will be prompted to fill this out once set up it automatically creates the event so let's go ahead and do that now we're just going to type in city and then i'm going to say demo student and year five let's go ahead and book and there we go it is all set up it's shared with the person we can close that and that slot is no longer available on this booking page has just been removed from the booking page and parents no longer see that so the appointment schedules feature is incredibly useful now as the person who set up this appointment schedule i can also see who has already booked so for example here i can see that this has already been booked when i click on it i also see who has booked this and scrolling down i get that information that i requested in that form so a great way of setting up virtual conferences check-ins with students or maybe even just drop-in sessions or training i hope you found this helpful if you did make sure to subscribe to the channel leave a like down below how would you use this in class and with students and parents let me know in that comment section below in the meantime thank you for watching and i will see you in the next one