End-of-Year Educator Tips

Wow, it’s getting to the end of the year already. Congratulations on all of your hard work! 

We hope you and your families enjoy using Storypark at your service. We’ve put together some handy tips and information to continue to make things as easy as possible for you throughout the holiday season.

Note: If your learning service is using the Xap or Kidsoft integrations or is part of a network on Storypark, some of the following actions will not apply to your service. This article explains which actions need to be taken in Xap or Kidsoft instead of Storypark. 

Children

Children leaving the centre?

You’ll want to archive their profile to remove it from your service. If you’re an admin, just go to the main Children page, find their profile tile and click the drop-down arrow at the top right. From there, you will see an option to Archive Child. When you do this, they will immediately be taken off the main Children page. They will then appear on the Archived tab of the Children page. Their tile will remain there indefinitely unless an admin parent deletes the child’s profile entirely from Storypark. If this happens, centre admins will be emailed to inform them. You will then have 7 days to export a copy of the child’s portfolio.

Need to keep the records of leaving children?

You can export a digital copy of a child’s portfolio at any time, either when they are still active at your service or after they’ve left. This allows you to keep a record of all their stories, routines, child notes and incident reports. 

Once a child’s profile is archived, you can no longer access their stories within Storypark or add to their profile. Exporting their files means you can still access this information externally. It also means you can now use that space on your service’s subscription for a new child profile.

Educators

What about staffing changes?

If you have staff who are leaving, they can be removed from your service’s Storypark account easily. Simply go to the main Teacher’s page, click the drop-down arrow on their profile tile and select Remove. This means they will no longer have access to your service.

Pro tip: If any of your staff are leaving, ensure they share their plans with at least one admin at the centre to ensure they can still be accessed, edited and shared after the author is no longer at the centre. They should also transfer editorship of their draft and pending stories before being removed, so your team can publish them when the time is right. Here are all our recommendations for things to consider before removing educators from Storypark.

As for new staff, send an invite to their email address to welcome them on board. It is important to set up new educators with their own individual email addresses. This allows them to have their own account and portfolio. Giving new staff access to a previous staff member’s account would mean the previous staff member would lose access to their own portfolio and is not in line with best privacy and security practices. Here are more recommendations for welcoming new educators to Storypark.

Centre

Will we lose stories or content we’ve created?

Stories and child notes are part of a child’s profile, so you will no longer have access to these after archiving a child, other than through their exported portfolio. 

If an educator wishes to keep copies of any of the stories they have written as an example of their work, they can simply duplicate the story and change who is selected in the story from a child’s name to their own teacher portfolio. The duplicated story then stays in their account, under their portfolio, even if the child is removed or the educator leaves the centre. 

Plans stay at your service. However, if any archived children are tagged or their child stories/notes are linked in a plan, their names will disappear, and any links will be greyed out.

Routine records and incident reports stay at your service even after children are removed.

If you need a copy of routine records to keep outside of Storypark, these can be exported by an admin from your service’s Reports page. The export is sent via email and you can then save the files to a hard drive and/or print them from there.

Similarly, if you need a copy of incident reporting records to keep outside of Storypark, these can also be exported by an admin from your service’s Reports page.

Children or educators moving rooms?

You can change a room for any child or educator. Just click edit next to the room name and tick who you want to be included in that room. 

Preparing for next year?

Add a copy of the monthly events calendar planning template to your service. Add key upcoming dates and share with your team, parents or both.
This is a great way to ensure that busy families have all of the information they need at their fingertips.

Completed a planning cycle or have multiple plans that won’t be as relevant next year? Consider bulk archiving them. Archiving plans keeps your Open plans area current and relevant, making it easier to find the plans you are working on – while archived plans can still be accessed for your reference, they are just filed in a seperate place to your open plans.

Families

What do family or guardians need to do?

If a family member has accepted your invitation to their child’s profile, they will have free access for as long as they want. They can continue to add their own content and invite others to the child’s profile, even after it has been archived. They can also export a copy of their child’s profile if they’d like a digital version of all their child’s stories and child notes. We have a resource you can share with families explaining what they need to do when their child leaves your learning service.

Useful ideas for the end-of-year community posts

Depending on how your centre operates over the holiday season, here are some ideas for community posts you could share with your families:

– Encourage families to share moments and photos of their holidays or celebrations

– Share the dates and times the centre will open 

– Ask parents to let you know when their child will be returning in the new year

– Share ideas and videos of activities they can do with their child over the break

– Introduce new staff to your learning community and let families know about any staffing changes

– Going to the beach or bush during the holidays? Suggest families and children collect natural resources for the centre

– Farewell children going off to school

Taking time off for a holiday?

If you have some much-deserved time off, you may want to pause your Storypark notifications during your break. You can select which posts you do or don’t want to receive notifications for in your notification settings. Just remember to turn them back on when you return. 

Do you have any end-of-year tips that work well in your service? Feel free to share them in the comments below!

To make your work a little easier, we have a checklist as a visual reminder your team can use. There’s two versions, an online version with links to the help centre as well as a printable version to pin it up in your office!