Childcare Attendance update

We pushed out a minor update to the attendance detail report available on the dashboard. It now shows the number of hours the child was checked in so you don't have to calculate it yourself. 

If the child hasn't been checked out yet we show the time since they were checked in this morning.  With electronic attendance for your childcare or daycare facility you can throw out those paper attendance sheets!

Attendance auto-checkout

We're rolling out a new feature tonight.  At the end of the day we'll automatically check out students so that your attendance sheets for the next day starts every one out.  If you need to edit the time later you can do so on the child profile screen on the device.  This will also ensure daily reports are sent to parents since we will send it when the child is checked out.  Hopefully this will help you save time and keep all of your parents informed!

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!

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