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Would be helpful if there was integration with zoom for merit badge councilors and some sort of online appointment colander scheduling system. This way when a approved appointment is scheduled a meting can be conducted on zoon as long as a parent or another scout is also on the same zoom meting,
This would really help a lot to help ensure transparency and also to make it easer for the scouts to set up meetings with merit badge councilors.
I understand many MB councilors may still be old school on alot of things. However, i think making a few changes especially due to the current COVID-19 would relly help scouts and councilors get MB work done.
Zoom isn’t the only (or even necessarily the best) conferencing tool. I’d hate to be restricted to using it instead of any other tool.
With that said, to make this work, you’d need your MBCs to maintain their calendars in Scoutbook, along with whatever other tools they’re using. I think that’s an uphill push – I know I don’t want to bother maintaining yet another calendar.
Yes, i do understand there are other systems other than zoom. However, zoom seems to be the most popular everyone is using.
On the calendar side not everyone wants to manage 2 clanders. However, there is a way they could set up a 2 way calendar sync were it looks at your own online calendars such as outlook or gmail and then blocks out anything you already have scheduled. Also they could add settings so you could specify what time of the day or what specific days of the week you want to be arable.
Once all settings are done when a scout schedules online the system would add it to your calendar once you aprove a appointment request.
I have summating similar to this at work but could be done for merit badge councilers to make things a bit easer.
I cannot make the assumption that all meeting between a Scout and MBC will be via a Zoom enabled meeting.
Merger of calendar information should be on the user (MBC) local device.
I suspect most councils are using an application for meeting management and perhaps another for calendar management. I suggest contacting your council for support.
I’m not clear on how this would be an enhancement to the current system as practiced by those of us who don’t still scribe our blue cards on stone. :^)
When I schedule with my scouts, they email me (with a copy to their parents or another leader), or in the pre-COVID days scouts from my troop cornered me at a troop meeting. They or I would suggest a date and time, and we worked it out from there. I schedule a Zoom meeting (or in some cases we just need a phone call, since the scouts has emailed me the documents/photos/etc and I can look them over while we talk. I’m not sure what would be added to this process by your proposed change.
It seems to me that MBCs who don’t use some sort of online calendar management are unlikely to use one that’s integrated with Scoutbook. On the flip side, I wouldn’t want to use one that’s integrated because the system I already have works well for me.
I guess maybe I’m not seeing the target audience for this feature?
