Parent involvement using videos from an iPhone or iPad

Whether it’s a beautiful day on the playground or your kids are partaking in a special classroom activity, sharing the moments with students, staff, and parents should be simple and easy with just the touch of a button.

With Tadpoles, you can now share videos with parents! Let them witness an exciting day at your daycare or childcare center. Rather than telling them later, show them!   Parent involvement has never been better.

Follow the step by step below:

You can access this feature by starting at the home screen.

Touch “share” or slide to the screen to the right.

Touch “video” at the bottom on the screen to start and stop recording.

Once you are done recording the video, you can share the observation!

“Pick kids” to choose the classroom or individual children in the video. 

Touch "edit notes" to add a caption, select the visibility and type for the observation, and add tags for the child portfolios!

You can save the video for later, or touch “send video” and it will be sent to the respective parents.

Parents will then receive an email where they can immediately play the video from any browser or mobile device.

Sharing a video with parents is fast and simple with Tadpoles!

As a provider you can replay this video by looking in the child's portfolio at http://tadpoles.com

Download the Childcare by Tadpoles application today and try it for yourself!

We love our customers!

I would like to personally thank our Tadpoles customers! We love and depend on your feedback. Receiving customer emails or app store reviews is one of the most important pieces in our company DNA. In fact, most of our product features have been at the request of childcare directors or teachers.  If you have an idea, question or would like to suggest a feature please talk.to.us@tadpoles.com.  

We are fortunate to have so many great customers that have helped us build the Tadpoles solution.  As we grow please continue to send us feedback and request on new features or guide us on how we can support you better.  A special thanks to Kelly in Schwenksville, Liz in San Diego, Pam in Lewes, Kellieann in Olde City, Sue in Meriden, Priscilla in Hawaii and many others that have helped shape Tadpoles vision. We always love to hear stories from Child Care providers on how Tadpoles has helped them. Please share with our Facebook friends your Tadpoles story or refer a friend to start using Tadpoles.  http://www.tadpoles.com

Cheers, 

Andy

Auto checkout at the end of the day.

We recently had a request for a new feature related to doing attendance using tadpoles.  Several providers mentioned that sometimes they may not get a chance or forget to checkout students at the end of the day.  They would love to have our system automatically checkout students if they didn't get to it.  With lots of parents coming to pickup their children at the end of the day we completely understand!  

With auto checkout hopefully you can save time and focus on wrapping up your day.  This new feature would help if a teacher or director forgot to upload a daily report since that would automatically be sent once the child had been marked out on the attendance sheet.  Parents benefit because we can now guarantee that every daily report will be delivered!

We're looking for feedback on what time you'd like to have children automatically checked out so its not too early and not too late.   Between 7pm and 8pm local time seems about right.  We'd also be interested to hear if anyone wouldn't want this feature automatically enabled.  So far everyone we've talked to loves the idea. 

Reach out to us at talk.to.us@tadpoles.com about this feature or any other ideas you might have.  We live for customer feedback!  Special thanks to Cara for requesting the feature.

New release for visiting

To kickoff your weekend we've got a great new release available for update in the app store this morning.  We've also updated our website with several new features.
Here's a summary of some of the new features:

• Collapsing classrooms
• Visiting older rooms
• Real-time sync for multiple devices
• Track vacation and sick days

We added a new option in the child profile screen called "visit classroom".  After selecting it you can then select the classroom to move the child into for the day.  At the end of the day, when you check the child out they will automatically be moved back to their homeroom.

We wanted to help providers that allow their younger children to visit older rooms during transition.  You can use this same feature for collapsing or combining classrooms at the end of the day.  You can move a child to multiple classrooms and they will always be moved back to the original homeroom.

If you have multiple devices you'll see these changes reflected on each device in real-time.  That ensures your counts are always accurate whether you're looking at them on the mobile device or from the web.

Lastly, the "track vacation" action from the child profile screen allows you to keep tabs on who is scheduled for today or out for the week.  You'll see the child on the out screen moved to the bottom and can view your attendance report from our website and click on the specific day to see the details captured from your iPhone or iPad.

In a follow on post we will walk through several of these new features in detail to help you start using them.   Let us know what you think!

My recent tadpoles roll out!

Hi I'm Amanda, an intern at Tadpoles this summer.  I recently visited a large childcare center in South Jersey to help them roll out the application.  I first met with the school’s director to begin the set up process of her Tadpoles account under the Director’s Dashboard and on 6 iPod devices. 

After a simple installation, we were ready to go live in the childcare facility, and began making our rounds to each classroom. At each stop, I gave a quick demo on how to use the device and access each feature on the application.  I worked individually with each teacher, briefly instructing how to switch classes, take attendance, snap profile pictures for each child, and document daily reports. 

Teachers immediately commented on how simple it was to use the device. Regardless of the teacher’s experience working with touch screen handhelds, each felt confident navigating Tadpoles. As the teachers walked around taking pictures and updating attendance, they commented how Tadpoles was so much more efficient than the previous system they used, and that they found it to be quick, easy, and less time consuming. 

For me, I could not believe the immediate, favorable reaction expressed by the childcare employees. They were excited with the features of Tadpoles and the way in which it streamlines and consolidates the document management process for each child. A successful roll out indeed! 

I concluded the day by emphasizing our commitment to provide customer support and encouraged the director to contact us immediately with questions, comments, concerns, and feedback, both positive and negative. Our ongoing mission after roll outs such as this is to gather customer feedback and apply it to improve the overall Tadpoles experience!

Father’s day updates!

This Father’s day, the dads at tadpoles are excited to provide several new updates.  We just rolled out a new web interface called the Director’s Dashboard.  Childcare directors now have a real-time view into everything that’s happening at their centers.  You can see live room counts, parent communications, reminders and daily schedules right from one spot.  What’s really exciting is that you don’t have to refresh the page, any changes automatically load as they occur!  

We’ve also added a new child portfolio screen so that you can quickly view child observations made from your iPhone or iPad.  They can be quickly organized by domain or dimension to help during child assessments.  Using tadpoles you can more effectively do observations and increase parent involvement at the same time!

Another great feature on the website allows you to do attendance from your browser in addition to your mobile device.  You can now do attendance in the classroom or from the front desk.  

The last feature we want to mention is Quick Lists.  If you open up the child profile screen from the web you can now add custom labels or tags to the child.  The labels help you manage special programs or needs that enable you to quickly go back and see which children are part of that group.  From the main dashboard you can then use the quick list drop down to filter the list of children who are part of that group.  

We’ve got a lot more great features that will be coming out over the summer.  We’d love to hear your feedback on what you like and what you’d love to see next.  Feel free to reach out to us at anytime at talk.to.us@tadpoles.com.  It’s the great customer feedback that we get that helps us continue to add awesome new features!

If you're not using tadpoles yet, let's get started today!  http://www.tadpoles.com/providers