#eylf documentation

With routines to be communicated and educators rostered over different portions of the day and sometimes in job sharing roles, it can be difficult to ensure that all educators are on the same page in terms of educational program provided to children, routines and family requests, and updates on changes to policies and procedure within the centre. Using Kinderloop, it is possible to create groups and tags that enable educators to quickly stay up-to-date on all changes that may occur on a day-to-day basis. It is also possible to utilise private posts to provide updates on routine changes that occur for individual children – sharing this information between educators that need this vital information.

Ensuring to-do lists are updated and followed up upon is also easy using Kinderloop, as each educator may edit posts. For example, following a team meeting there may be a number of Work Health and Safety issues that need to be addressed. These may be posted privately to educators and tagged with “To Do” and “Work Health and Safety” so all educators are aware of tasks required. That post can then be edited as tasks are achieved and deleted as needed. This is a powerful tool for ensuring that all staff are on the same page.

Sharing interesting readings is an important part of ensuring continuing education of the educators within a centre. With Kinderloop, an educational leader can post articles for educators to read when time allows. Comments may also be added to posts associated with these articles, allowing for staff discussion in a safe forum while time allows. This is also a great way of posting preparation articles and agenda items for upcoming team meetings.

Continuous improvement must now be embedded into everyday practice within early childhood education and care settings. Ensuring that all educators have a voice in the quality improvement plan can be difficult, however, as this document tends to be prepared by the director, educational leader and room leaders. With Kinderloop each educator can make a contribution to ideas for the quality improvement plan by creating private posts and tagging “Quality Improvement Plan”. This way when the director or educational leader is preparing the document, contributions are available from all educators, covering all areas of the centre environment.

As with all regulatory and compliance documents, security is paramount. Kinderloop provides high-level security for all posts. Families elect who may be invited to view their child’s individual Kinderloop. And the centre’s Kinderloop is protected by educators, with content remaining the property of educators. All accounts are password protected and best of all data is continuously backed up archived as needed.

Providing evidence of staffing and service leadership doesn’t need to be daunting, with Kinderloop it is easy to store a variety of vital information in one spot with specific grouping and search capabilities.

Promoting each child’s routine, sleep and eating habits may be easily and quickly shared with families using digital documentation. This fosters and supports strong and meaningful relationships with families and shares each aspect of the child’s day with their families. Information about healthy lifestyles and eating habits may also be shared using Kinderloop and can help to further foster a sense of community. Why not post a healthy recipe that the children have been enjoying at the centre and invite families to share their favourite recipe?

Environmental intelligence starts in the early years of learning. A sustainability plan could be easily shared with families and educators using digital documentation, allowing for real time feedback and is a great step for reducing the environmental impact of sharing information with families. All areas of the educational program that relate to sustainable practice can also be tagged to allow for easy searching and tracking of projects and wish lists.

Giving the children a voice in their learning environment is a key step to empowering children to take a role in their educational journey. Providing children with opportunities to share their ideas and to create meaningful ways of tracking their exploration through project work can deepen the understanding and engagement in such products. Within Kinderloop, this may be achieved by creating groups or tags for specific projects. These can then be searched and viewed as meaningful documentation for the learning journeys children take when following their interests.

Mind maps can be a great tool for documenting the process of exploring children’s ideas and possibilities for future planning (read more here). Apps like “SimpleMind” allow for expanding ideas through various branches and promote child and educator engagement, encouraging children to think outside of the norm. Using these in conjunction with Kinderloop allows for an expanding of possibilities on ways of recording children’s ideas, and opens up possibilities for expressing ideas.

Creating specific groups can also help educators map their ideas for the learning environment and record the observed engagement of children in the areas already available to them in the learning environment. These groups can also be used with the assistance of tags to ensure that interests and areas of focus may be included in future planning for intentional teaching.

In many educational settings, the term curriculum and educational program are used interchangeably. All decisions made in the development and ongoing analysis of the educational program may be influenced by the knowledge that educators gain from observing, analysing and assessing the learning, development and interests of the children in their care.

from “Educators’ Guide to the Early Years Learning Framework for Australia” 

How each centre and educator presents their observations, planning cycle and curriculum can vary as much as the children attending our centres and will be influenced by the educators’ philosophies.

How educators have planned for the learning of children has evolved from boxes with learning areas with activities changed daily, to mind maps following interests, to child-focused discussion groups to plan the learning environment and foster engagement.

With the emergence of digital documentation methods, gathering the data required for planning an educational program has never been easier (link to obs post). With your centre’s own private Kinderloop, all observations are available to educators to observe and build into the educational program; encompassing the learning environment, intentional teaching moments and projects planned to extend upon interests and skills observed.

Representing the educational program is easy with Kinderloop. There are an abundance of ways to display the program being provided at your centre. Below are just a few ideas on how to display, document and review your curriculum.

Creating Specific Groups

The wonderful thing about Kinderloop is how easy it is to customise using groups and tags. It is possible to create a group for each room’s curriculum. Here educators can post photos of learning environments and add analysis and assessment either through editing the description on the photo or by adding a comment to the photo. Educators are able to add data to the comments if they see a child engaging with an educational area or add links made to observation posts made to individual children’s Kinderloops.

Creating Mind Maps

Expressing the curriculum as a mind map is another popular option for documenting and assessing the educational program. To keep things simple, there are now apps for your iPad or Tablet which mean that brain storming can be completed on the run on your device!

(Created using SimpleMind)

The mind map can then be saved to your photos and quickly posted to your Kinderloop as either a public or private post. Evaluation can then happen in the comments section. It is also possible to upload documents to your private Kinderloop meaning that supporting documents can be added to your planning documentation.

Each educator will observe children in slightly different ways, using a variety of different observation types: jottings, anecdotal and running records. Formats and presentation methods for observations will vary from centre to centre and evolve overtime.

When I started as an Advanced Child Care Worker after completing my diploma, programming and planning occurred in the form of learning stories prepared for the families to see. Observations were completed in a full page format, with detailed observation, analysis and assessment of learning, with links to the “NSW Curriculum Framework for Children’s Services”, including references to the various developmental domains of the child. Feedback from families was that they loved the pictures of their children but that all the text was too technical and not very interesting.

With the introduction of the Early Years Learning Framework, the focus of documentation and programming moved away from providing a product for families and towards meaningful and purposeful interactions with children. Programming remained a vital component of planning and providing an educational program for children, but the time spent per observation was reduced, allowing for more time spent engaging. There was still a lot of time spent writing out learning outcomes observed and having to cross reference ideas and observations through big piles of paper.

As I completed my Teaching Degree, I saw the introduction of digital documentation making programming simpler still. Observations can be posted to the centre’s private Kinderloop quickly on the floor with children or in down times during the day and added to my programming group (see how here). In my programming time all I have to do is search for observations tagged with my group (generally private posts) and I can analyse and assess the learning of the children observed (either by editing the post or by adding my assessment in the comments section). I don’t have to write out the learning outcomes I have observed any more as it is simple and easy to add a tag to the observation. Developmental areas may also be identified and tagged, making it super fast to complete developmental checklists if required or complete more detailed reports that may be required for external sources (for example for primary schools in the case of those in their last year of preschool).

Linked families have access to all of the observations completed on their child in the form of public (white) posts with a small jotting. I am able to duplicate the posts seen by families and create private (yellow) posts seen only by educators, and add the detail I need to conduct an analysis of learning and development. These private posts can then include the centre based curriculum directions and follow up required under the National Quality Standard and may even include links to the Quality Improvement Plan of the centre, which is often not relevant to families.

Programming is a vital component of the day-to-day running of an early childhood education centre. It can be daunting; with limitless possibilities for representing the learning of children. Kinderloop allows for educators to streamline the programming process, limiting duplicating data and allowing for more time spent implementing the planned program with the children.

Planning

When it comes to planning, reminders are a great way to show links to your thinking in regards to observations set them up on a new online post or in the reminder tab. Another beautifully simple way to achieve this is simply to create a yellow (draft) post with your planning thoughts and tag it with the child’s name and create a new learning tag called ‘Planning’ that way, when you either search for the child’s name or the ‘Planning’ tag you will see your thoughts...

The National Quality Standard regarding observation documentation, programming and planning states that “Each child's learning and development is assessed as part of an ongoing cycle of planning, documenting and evaluation." How this is done is entirely up to the centre and educator. Paper based documentation has many formats (see picture for example) and these are often personalised depending on the organisation and centre requirements.

from “Observations and Reflections in Childhood” by Diane Szarkowicz (2006) Thompson Social Science Press

Within paper based documentation systems there a few boxes that must be ticked:

child’s name

date

observational data (jotting, running record or anecdotal record are generally used most frequently)

educators’ assessment of learning

analysis and future planning.

When making the move over to a digital documentation system, the format may be slightly different but the content remains the same.

Using an app like Kinderloop makes observation recording and analysis simple and quick, with links possible right in the recording stage. It also makes observational records searchable and follow-up possible with the click of a button.

There are two types of posts possible within Kinderloop: public (white shading and viewable by families and educators); and private (yellow shading and is viewable only by educators). Depending on the policies and procedures at your centre you may be able to post your observation and analysis on a public post for parents to see, or you utilise the private posts for recording analysis and assessment of learning.

Recording an observation is simple:

• take a photo (if you desire) of the event being observed, log into Kinderloop and link the photo

• select the type of post you would like to create (send to parents or private),

• select the child you are observing and any relevant groups

• type in your observation, either at the time for a running record or later for a jotting or anecdotal record (sometimes paper notes are still handy to jog your memory),

• assign the appropriate tags for your observation (learning outcomes, developmental areas, child interest, intentional teaching etc)

• record your assessment of the learning (this can be done within the post or within the comments section after the post has been saved)

• record your ideas for follow up and addition to the learning program

• save your observation by selecting Post and your observational record is saved to the centre’s Kinderloop.

The great thing about this observational record is that it can be quickly reviewed by all educators and is fully editable if you forgot something! Developmental records may be recorded and viewed on a device with the Kinderloop app or on a desktop or laptop computer using a web browser. Developmental records are securely stored within each centre’s private Kinderloop and easily archived for storage in line with regulatory requirements.

Quality Area 1

“An approved learning framework informs the development of a curriculum that enhances each child’s learning and development”

“Educators and co-ordinators are focused, active and reflective in designing and delivering the program for each child”

Ensuring that each child was considered when developing the educational program became a significant challenge and one that appealed to the list maker in me. I love a good checklist, spreadsheet or form that needs to be filled out so I quickly set about developing a range of tools that would ensure that each child was being observed across all developmental domains and that these observations were being used in the development and planning of learning areas and structured times within the learning environment.

With traditional observation and documentation methods, there was constant need for cross-referencing to ensure that all learning areas were observed and reported upon for each child. Analysis of the observations entailed examining data across a folder’s worth of paper and at times seemed never-ending and incredibly complicated. More than once I have found myself confused at my own checklist and spreadsheet and wondering where on earth I had put an observation that has been recorded but is now missing! Documenting learning links in traditional documentation is also complex and requires linking across a variety of document types in various locations.

With Kinderloop, all of these complex links, analysis and consideration in programming and planning became so simple. With all the data in one place and searchable, I found myself no longer missing observations and not even really needing my spreadsheet to ensure equality across the children in my care! Linking observations to the program and learning outcomes became as simple as adding a tag to a post. Developing the educational program with consideration for each child became a matter of simply looking up a specific group and the tags within.

The best part about this new form of documentation is that it is completely customisable, each educator within the learning environment can use it in a way that makes the most sense to them, altering and adding new tags, creating different groups and adjusting analysis and assessment of learning within the comments section.

Then came the ultimate checklist: Kinderloop health! This amazing feature is a statistic loving educator’s dream come true. This feature gives you a run down of how many posts have been made per child, who may need a few more posts, which learning outcomes are the most popular and which need to be examined a bit more. It is possible to see at a glance the number of posts for children within the entire centre and within an individual educator’s observational group - no more spread sheet, no more checklist; everything you need in one place for ease of assessment, analysis and linking!

As everything is located centrally, for assessment and rating or spot check it is easy to share information with assessment and compliance officers. It couldn’t be more simple to ensure that “each” child is being considered in the development of the learning program and that it this achievement is documented for assessment.

Efficient Recording

Every educator on the floor with the children or in the office finishing admin tasks is time poor. Kinderloop has a simple interface that allows educators to achieve multiple tasks in minutes, for example;

record developmental information about children, including observations and assessment of learning,

share information with parents about the latest centre event then

record the follow-ups required of staff after the recent staff meeting.

All of this vital recording is possible with one app, saving time on each task!

Each centre is different, with diverse needs so it is important to have flexibility within your recording system. The options are limited only by the creativity of the educational team; unique tags can be created to ensure efficient searching, groups can be used to allow educators to track focus groups, and posts may be made accessible to parents or posted privately for educator assessment and analysis. For more customisation features check out the amazing videos by Michelle (http://kinderloop.com/help.html).

When it comes to the assessment and rating visit, just create a special account for the A&C Officer and they can access your Kinderloop and review all of the wonderful evidence you have gathered!

Amazing Family Engagement

Always have trouble catching little Jess’s parents at the end of a busy day? Parents are now able to their children’s daily achievements in real time and comment immediately from their mobile device. Kinderloop gives families a real sense of belonging to their children’s day and enhances the community spirit surrounding the centre.

New features are added regularly that help further support family engagement! Families can now create posts and share events from the child’s time at home with the educators at the centre, completing the sharing loop and further strengthening bonds between educators and family.

Community Support and Feature Requests

Early childhood educators are busy. Kinderloop has created an online community to provide support to these educators across various sites across the world. Within this support community exist some truly amazing ideas! One fantastic examine is: Want a better way to record your daily yard check? Just laminate your daily yard check record, use a whiteboard marker to sign your record then take a picture and post it to your Kinderloop as a private post with a custom tag! No more folder full of paper and easy to check for Assessment and Compliance!

The amazing support team at Kinderloop are always ready to answer questions and respond to feedback and are constantly adding new simple features to the app and website; just check out their Facebook page for upcoming updates!

Privacy

Most important to early childhood educators is protecting the children entrusted into our care. With each private Kinderloop created, the educator owns the content and invites the family to see updates that both relate to the child and the service. This ensures the upmost security and privacy is upheld and means that images cannot be shared anywhere on social media and invitations are managed by the educator, with written consent by the parent.

As an early childhood educator and parent this feature is key as it insures that content is protected by educators, that group photos can be shared with confidence and that assessment and evaluations of development may be stored securely and shared with families as appropriate with the required context.

I entered the Early Childhood Education sector at a time of great change for the industry: the EYLF was just about to be released, and the NQS was looming on the horizon. Change was coming to all aspects of the industry, and documentation and planning seemed to be lagging behind.

I was soo excited when I learnt of Kinderloop, and couldn’t wait to explore it! A platform that would allow educators to record children’s growth through pictures, movies and observations; evaluate them in the same space; provide quick and easy updates on the educational program; and to share that with families on a secure site, with an app for phone and tablet! Amazing! That first login was magical! The possibilities for engagement were endless! The challenge was to share my passion with fellow educators and nurture their engagement.

At each centre there are a variety of personalities and learning types within the educational team. Within my setting there were a number of educators who were quite excited to be programming and documenting children’s learning journeys on a computer/tablet, and others who wanted to continue the hand-written jottings that had been our planning system. Some educators took it upon themselves to explore the site, have a few test posts and just run with it for the most part. Others enjoyed the videos and guides available online (http://kinderloop.com/help.html), and found it useful to discuss the possibilities as a group before diving in.

Of the learning types, there was a clear divide between the “digital natives” like me and the “digital immigrants” who claimed they had no confidence with a computer and were sure that they were going to break something.

With a lot of hand-holding, wonderful help documents, a user friendly interface, and practice, all of the educators gained confidence in using Kinderloop. The educator that first told me “I’ll never be able to do that; I can’t use computers” became the most prolific poster!

Parent engagement increased dramatically as families were able to see in very near real-time what their children were exploring on any given day, follow long-term projects and contribute their ideas quickly to centre life.

Educators noticed a reduction in the amount of double handling of photos, with a reduction in the number of photos printed. Children’s learning was documented quickly and efficiently, with follow-ups recorded instantly. Over time, the depth of information gathered was able to assist us in keeping up to date with our improvement goals.

With Kinderloop, any educator can become a digital native and share their passion for educating children with colleagues and families!