Recording an Observation for a Child's Portfolio

With Tadpoles, you can record observations, save them in the child's portfolio, and track them overtime! This method of paperless management makes filing reports quick and easy with the iPhone/iPad application. On your desktop under the Director's Dashboard, your children's notes and observations will be neatly organized! 

Follow these steps to access the feature:

Start at the homescreen and touch "share". 

Then, tap the "write note" box and the bottom of the share screen.

Under "share observation", select the child or children you are composing the note about 

by tapping their profile picture. 

Select the visibility type as "portfolio" to save it to the child's portfolio for future reference. Compose the note, and add tags depending on the type of activity or incident. 

Refer to the Director's Dashboard to check the child's observations in his or her portfolio. 

Select the child and click on the observation to read each note! 

Try out this feature now by downloading Childcare by Tadpoles in the App Store!

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.

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