Group Video Sessions vs. One-on-One PTMs: When to Use Each

Not every conversation a school has with parents is a private, individual one. A term overview, a policy update, or a general Q&A ahead of exams is genuinely a one-to-many announcement, not thirty separate ten-minute meetings repeating the same information. PTM Live supports both shapes, and the distinction matters for which one to reach for.

One-on-one PTM slots: individual, private, tied to one child

A standard PTM slot is a private room shared by exactly one teacher and one parent, generated fresh per booking and never reused. This is the right shape whenever the conversation is actually about one specific child — progress, concerns, anything a family wouldn't want another parent to overhear. Importing a roster and auto-assigning by roll number is specifically about filling these individual slots efficiently.

Group sessions: one shared room, up to an hour, invited by link

A group session is a single video room a teacher opens for a specific date and time — up to an hour long — that any number of parents join from one shared link, sent automatically by WhatsApp and email to every family in the class. This is the right shape for a genuine announcement: information every family in a class needs at once, where there's no privacy reason to keep it one-to-one.

What group sessions are not meant to replace

A group session is a single scheduled call, not a recurring classroom or a general video-conferencing replacement — there's no recurring weekly timetable, no recording, and invites go to a parent's contact details, not a separate student login. It's built for one-off, whole-class communication alongside individual PTMs, not as a substitute for a school's existing tools for actual classroom teaching.

Both meeting types run on the same underlying PTM round and access window — there's no separate purchase or setup for group sessions once a school's PTM access is open. For the fuller picture of how individual meetings, group sessions, reminders, and roster import fit together across an actual PTM day, see how to run PTM day without the usual chaos.