Hello Everyone

[Guest]

Good Morning All,

 

I have just begun a new role as Daycare Manager and we are currently looking at introducing Tapestry within our setting. Would love to hear from people who have recently done so and how you support staff who are computer phobics.

 

Elaine

[FSFRebecca]

Hello Elaine!

Welcome to the forum and congratulations on making your first post :1b

Tapestry can be very successfully introduced into large nurseries, even with staff who are a bit anxious of the technology, I know this to be true - I have done it myself.

When I introduced it (large daycare 60+ children in 3 groups) we didn't allow any parent access to start with. I let the team leader in the baby room have a play while we were still using the trial and she tried making some obs of just a few children until she felt confident. Then once we were signed up we let the rest of her room begin using it. Very very quickly they got the hang of it. When we had parents evening we set up Tapestry on a nursery computer and showed the parents of the children in that one room their child and then helped them get signed in - we set up manual passwords, while they were sitting there, and then they changed them themselves. We made sure that no parents left parents evening without knowing how to log in. Once that one room was confident (took maybe a month), we introduced Tapestry to our toddler room and repeated the process - we didn't have a parent meeting scheduled so I made sure that for one week I was ready, with my laptop at pick up time and I made sure everyone was happy. Then we repeated one more time to get our preschool signed up. Over one term we had the whole nursery up and running.

Staff who can use Facebook find Tapestry simple and parents are the same. Staff who are less confident understand the processes and have a step by step approach to making observations. Within a term all staff, even my reluctant ones, were confident. It helped not to be automatically sending obs to parents in the beginning and staff felt it was ok to 'have a go' because there were few consequences to 'doing it wrong'.

There are lots of helpful tips and resources here - if you need them!

Good luck, let us know how you get on!