The financial and practical impacts of Storypark

Hi I’m Natasha and I own and manage Small Poppies. We are an early learning service based in Ruakaka in Northland, New Zealand, with 6 teachers and 50 children.

We adopted Storypark in January 2014 and the results have been significant for our business both in terms of impact and for our bottom line.

Using the centre’s existing technology and purchasing a few additional iPads (a cost of around $2,200) we decided to stop printing learning stories (sharing these instead via Storypark) and to send children’s physical work home in scrapbooks.

We previously spent about $6,500 each year ($700 per month) on printing and consumables, and teachers wasted considerable time in the process of creating stories, reporting and recording evidence.

Our Storypark subscription now costs us around $600 per annum. Implementing Storypark reduced printing and paper waste and cut costs of producing child’s learning portfolios by about 90%. It has also halved the amount of time it takes teachers to do their reporting and documentation and I estimate I’ve saved around $6,000 in productivity as a result.

So all up we have saved around $12,280 this year as a result of using Storypark AND our teachers all have iPads AND are creating even better results for children and families than before.

Even with the cost of the additional iPads the savings are still significant.

Note from Storypark: iPads are not essential in using Storypark. No technical investment is necessary to implement Storypark assuming you already have cameras
and computers available, however better technology does make a difference to performance and productivity.

This case study is a great example of the potential savings once a community around the centre is ready ie. all families have internet access and the technology is available for children to revisiting their learning.

Time saving features for teachers

The things that have made the greatest difference for us have been:

1. quickly recording children’s learning and evidence of teachers development too
2. being able to immediately search and find stories
3. learning about the work of other teachers and
4. working more effectively as a team
5. communicating faster and with greater engagement with parents and families via the various channels within Storypark
6. immediately being able to filter, analyse and understand information to improve planning and how we respond to children’s interests.

I recommend Storypark as a tool to help your team work more effectively together, to save time and make reporting more enjoyable, to improve impact for children and to save money!

http://www.smallpoppiesruakaka.co.nz/