End of year transitions

It’s beginning to look a lot like… well, that time of the year when you seem to have even less time in the day than you do the rest of the year.  Things always seem to be that much more hectic as the “silly” season looms closer. As we head towards the end of the year, there is a mountain of tasks that need to be done and they needed to be done yesterday.   

Around this time of year, we start to get a lot of queries from frazzled educators and teachers, looking for ways to sort out some of their seemingly endless end of year tasks.  At Storypark, we want to help you streamline those and save you some time. Here are some of the most common queries we get and the ways that Storypark can help you beat back the administrative niggles.

Changing Rooms

The end of the year often marks the time when children move from one room to another. In Storypark, this can be as simple as a few clicks. Rooms in Storypark are just a means of filtering between the children and teachers you have at your service. To move children from one room to another, all you need to do is find the room you are moving them to under your menu and select edit next to it.  

This will open up the profile of the room where you will find a list of all children at your service. To add children to that room, just tick the box next to their name and then click save. All of their stories and notes will follow along with them to the new room. To remove children, it is the same process but simply untick them.  

Children Moving on

When children head off to school or move away, you can free up spaces on your plan by archiving them from your main children’s page. 

The child’s profile will then sit under your ‘archived children’ tab, where you can export their portfolio of stories and notes at any time in the future. Storypark is free for parents for life. This means they can continue to access stories, and add new ones, even after their child has been archived from your service.

You can also look to invite the new service. If you know where the child is moving to, you can send an invitation to the new service so that the teachers and educators there can see the child’s learning journey up until that point.  On that child’s profile, go to ‘early learning service’ on the right and then select ‘invite new’.

This will send a request for confirmation to the parent before the invitation is forwarded to the new service.

Exporting a Child’s Profile

Although specific statutory requirements vary between areas, you will usually need to keep a copy of a child’s profile on hand for a while after a child has moved on. You can export a copy of a child’s stories and notes from Storypark, which you can then save on a hard drive to access later. To do this, just go to a child’s profile on your main ‘children’s page’ then select ‘edit profile’ from the drop-down options. On the right hand side, you can select ‘export portfolio’. The files will come through as a zip folder, with separate files for stories, photos and notes. Once you extract the files, keep the files stored together on a hard drive or computer. That way when you open the story from the stories file, the photos will link up.

How about saving yourself even more time by not doing the export at all. When you remove a child, their profile sits under the ‘removed children tab’ from your ‘children’s page’. That means you can action the export at a later date should you need to or when you have a little more time on your hands. A growing number of services have told us they simply leave the portfolios there and only arrange exports on request or if a parent deletes their child’s profile from Storypark (in which case you will get an email giving you seven days to request the export and a link to do so).

Create a Transition Statement

There is always paperwork that needs to be done and we often hear from teachers and educators who want help with creating meaningful summative assessments and transition statements. We have set up the NSW version of the ‘Transition to School’ statement as a planning template within the ‘planning’ section, which is automatically included for all learning services on Storypark. You can create a statement from there which can be saved as a PDF to either print off or to be sent as an email. You can also adapt the template to create a summative assessment of your own, tailoring the template for your service or your region.

We hope these tips and tricks help give you a little more breathing room at this time of the year.  However, if you have any other questions about getting things sorted, you can check out the ‘need help’ link in the bottom right of Storypark or email our support team at hello@storypark.com.  We are here to help!

Compliments of the season to you and your team! For those fortunate enough to be taking a much-deserved break, enjoy yourselves and we look forward to continuing our journey with you in the New Year.