The following is a testimonial from Meagan Bell, recipient of the Canadian Prime Minister’s Award for Early Childhood in 2014. She comments on her use of Storypark at the Kanata Research Park Family Centre in Ottawa, Ontario.
As we began the 2014 school year in our kindergarten program, we focused our attention on improving how we provide accessible ways for families and educators to maintain ongoing communication, collaboration and partnerships in regards to each child’s individual learning and development. After hearing about www.storypark.com we decided to give it a try…
In a few short weeks we had all our families using Storypark with great results. This tool allows us to post stories of learning and development, pictures, videos, audio recordings of conversations with children, curriculum plans, newsletters, and summaries of development.
Parents are able to contribute to a reciprocal learning community by commenting on stories, adding stories of learning from home, and contributing to conversations about their child’s development.
Our parents have commented on how connected and engaged they feel in their children’s learning and to the curriculum since we started using Storypark.
Many of our parents have utilized the feature of adding extended family to their child’s individual page and as a result we have extended family in parts of the world as far as Russia and China sharing in the stories and adding to the culture in our classroom.
Since we started using Storypark, I feel more connected to the families in our program as there is a continuous interchange of stories and conversations about each child’s learning and development.
At the Kanata Research Park Family Centre, we recently created a ‘room’ on Storypark to facilitate professional conversations between staff. This has provided myself as well as all the staff at the Family Centre an opportunity to participate in professional learning and contribute to professional conversations.
I just wanted to share this great resource.”
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