What’s new at Storypark – June 2020

Over the past months, we have released a few new features that we want to share with you. Part of the process for working on Storypark improvements and new features involves collating, reviewing and prioritising the feedback you give us. Knowing what matters to you, and more importantly, WHY it is important to you, helps us to understand, and help solve your problems. June brings to you a few new updates and improvements that we know many of you have been finding valuable.

Here’s what’s new!

iOS Educators App

We recently released a new iOS educators app and the feedback we are hearing is that you love it as much as we do! It’s a brand new app so rather than updating the old one you’ll need to download it from the app store. 

There are some big changes that’ll help you do more on the go: 

• The new navigation along the bottom of your screen has tabs for children, community, creating stories, activity, and your own teacher tab. 
• Under the “children” tab, you’ll see a list of the children that you can filter by room. You can choose to view stories for the whole group, or an individual child. This is a great place to get an overview of what has been happening for all of the children in that room. Tapping on a story opens it for you to read or comment on.
• When creating stories you can now easily structure the layout, reordering the images and text exactly how you want.
• Save time adding learning tags! Rather than scrolling through every single learning tag to add to a story, you can now browse by folders or search for your desired learning tag.
• Draft stories will automatically save and be available for you in your drafts next time you log on. This will preserve all of your formattings when you next open the app or the website
• Keep track of all of your community posts and conversations in the new Community section – create new posts, attach files and images, and respond to comments.  
• A new activity stream keeps you up to date with the latest activity, similar to the duck icon on the website. 
• If you have a patchy internet connection, are saving a story or uploading a large file (such as video), your work will now save to the device you are using so that you won’t lose your hard work! Once you reconnect to the internet and open the app, it will continue uploading to Storypark. 
• You will find pop up hints to help you navigate the changed layout when you first log into the new app, making it easy to get started. 

Website Improvements

 A few improvements on the website that you may have noticed too:

• Search has moved from the left side menu to the main navigation so that it is visible wherever you are on the website. You can now search community posts as well as stories and search both the titles and text within stories. The use of the search function has increased by a whopping 150% since the improvement! 
• You are now able to invite more than one parent to a child’s profile, making both parents admins. This is only possible with any new children, not for existing children.
• The stories page now shows the name of the child who the story is about, or if it’s a group story.
• We have increased the size limit for videos from 500mb to 1gb.

Families App

• Families can now manage all of their notifications through the apps.
• We’re continuing to improve how families share their moments from home. It’s now easier to create a moment on iOS Family app, and family moments can have multiple images in each moment rather than creating many individual moments. Plus there’s no limit on the number of photos they can share! As an Educator you can see these family moments in the “Stories > Family” tab on the web, and families really appreciate when you respond to their moments.