AnonyMouse_25350

I replied to your email about this on Thursday.

All you need to do to back up the .sg2 file is copy it to the S drive every day. I'm afraid PRAMS can't do this itself, however you might be able to find another way of automating it.

I should point out that PRAMS is now end-of-life. This means that we are not going to make any updates or fixes for it, and we won't guarantee that we'll provide any more support for it. If the curriculum were to change, we would not be updating it with the new one. Our successor product to PRAMS is Tapestry, which you might like to consider switching to. Tapestry is a web application so we look after all your data and keep it safe. We can also import your PRAMS data into your Tapestry account on request.

You might find that the comparison screen gives you what you want. To access it, go the analysis and then "EYFS", scroll to the bottom of the page and click "Individual" next to "Comparison". Click "Add Snapshot" and choose two assessment periods to compare ("Baseline" is an option). Then click "Add Child" and choose a child.

Tapestry doesn't put any page numbers in the PDFs for next steps. This means that any you're seeing on paper are coming from your printer. You might be able to change whether or not it prints the page numbers by changing the print options when you print the PDF. If you can turn them off, you can write in your own numbers by hand once you're printed the pages out.

At the bottom of the above tutorial, it explains how you can make a report accessible to relatives. They can then access it from within Tapestry in the same way that you can.

Are they able to login but don't see anything when they get there? It might be that they have not been attached to their child. You can check this by going into "Manage Relatives", it should show the connected children for each relative in the list. If the child is not attached, you need to edit the relative and attach them.

To make an observation from home they just need to login and then use the "Add Observation" if they're using a web browser or the "+" button if they're using the Tapestry app.

Do you mean that you only want to be notifiied when of actions taken by relatives? Or that you want to filter your notifications to only show the ones from relatives on the notifications page?

I suspect that the parent is still active at the sending setting, and this is preventing her from logging into the receiving setting. The Tapestry app is not yet capable of letting you choose which setting to login to if you are registered at more than one, it will just log you into the first setting for which your email address and password are correct. When relatives are transferred, their login details remain the same, so they have 2 accounts at 2 different settings with the same email address and password. This means that the app will only ever log them into one of the settings. To fix this, you need to make the relative inactive at the sending setting, which will prevent the app from trying to log them into there.

Do you allow your staff to publish observations directly to the journal? If not, no notifications will be sent when the observations are created because Tapaetry only sends notifications when observations are first published to the journal. We will be introducing notifications for managers about new unapproved observations over the coming months. If you don't think that's what's causing the problem, please send us a support ticket and we'll investigate.

I'm afraid there is currently no way of setting the baseline dates for all children at once. You will have to do it for each child.

We are working on some new export formats because we've had feedback from others that the new format takes up too much space on the page when printing. I've turned these on for your setting so you can evaluate them. When you go to export an observation, you should now see the the "Export" button has a drop-down menu which adds two new options. The "compact" option reduces the size of images, text and spacing to make the observation take up less space on the page. The "printer friendly" option is the same as the "compact" option but additionally removes background colours (to use less ink). You should find the same options are now available when exporting the whole journal to PDF.

Personally I would recommend a cloud-based email service provider over handling it locally on your computer. The reason for this is simple. A cloud provider will employ a great many people and invest a lot effort in ensuring that their platform is secure. I'm pretty sure that none of us has the time, expertise or resources to maintain the same level of security on our personal computers.

As BroadOaks says, one of the most common ways for viruses to get onto your computer is in email attachments. A good email provider will scan the attachments for you and ensure that they are safe before you even receive the email, let alone think about downloading the attachment to your computer. A good provider will also prevent phishing emails (ones that try to trick you into logging into a fake site) from ever getting to you.

It is essential to use a strong password for your email account. Do not use just a word, or even a word with a couple of numbers on the end. You should use a mixture of lower case letters, upper case letters, numbers and ideally other symbols. It should also be as long as you can conveniently manage, 10 characters at minimum. Also do not use the same password for multiple things, if someone finds out the password from one of them, they will be able to access the others. If you have trouble remembering many complex passwords (who wouldn't?) I recommend using a password manager (LastPass is great) to store them, protected by one super strong password.

Many good email providers will also allow you to use multi-factor authentication for your account. What this means is that you will need several things in order to gain access. The first one will be your password, and the second one will generally be your phone. When you login (sometimes this is just the first login on a new device) you will have to enter your password and then you will be sent a code by text message (or sometimes there's an app) which you need to enter in order to get in. This is an extremely strong security measure and I very much recommend that you use it.

Another issue is the safety of your data. If you store all your emails on your computer and then one day you spill your drink on it, they could all be lost forever. A good cloud provider will go to great lengths to ensure that nothing like that will happen to them.

Finally there is the issue of privacy. If your email account is free, the company providing it is making money from it in some other way. Usually this is by advertising, and the big free providers will have programmes which automatically scan through your emails in order to help them to target the adverts more effectively. This doesn't mean that anybody working there ever ends up reading your mail, and I would not expect it to happen, but it is exposed in some way. I suspect this is why some organisations won't exchange email with these providers if it contains confidential information. If you use a paid email service, it's likely that the content of you mail will be more private.

So who should you use? Personally I would recommend Gmail, with a strong password and multi-factor authentication (they call it Two-Step Verification). Alternatively, if you want a bit more privacy and control, I would recommend FastMail. It's not free but you get better privacy in return. They also support multi-factor authentication (which they also call Two-Step Verification), and of course you should use a strong password. FastMail is great for businesses, so you could potentially use it to have all your staff set up with their own email addresses, all controlled by a master account that allows you to control what they can do.

There's currently no way to import assessments into Tapestry from SIMS, but you should be able to do it the other way around. In the group snapshots, you can export the data to a CSV file (Excel spreadsheet compatible) and I expect you will be able to import this into SIMS.

Sorry, you would have to do them one at a time. The alternative would be to ask them to go to the Tapestry login page and use the "Having trouble logging in?" link to access the password reset system and send themselves their own emails.

Yes, Tapestry has ECAT. You can turn it on by following the instructions in this tutorial.

You need to go into "Manage Children" and change the filters so that they show inactive children.

Could you please send us a support ticket, giving as much information as possible? We'll try to figure out what's going wrong.

You're very welcome. It's nice to hear that the parental engagement works both ways!

It is likely to either be because the children are inactive, which you can see and change in "Manage Children", or that you are filtering the children out on the "Observations" and "Children" tabs, which you can fix by changing the filters at the top of those tabs.

The only way to do this at the moment would be for the relative to set their phone to make a noise when they receive an email. Then when they receive an email notification from Tapestry it would ring.

Tapestry's Reports are based on and compatible with 2 year checks, so you can just create one of those. See this tutorial for more details.

In a group observation, any assessments apply to all the children involved. There is no way of getting the relatives of each child to see something different unless you split the observation and edit each copy to suit the child attached to it. Please see this tutorial for more details.

The check for observations is really just there so you can only delete a member of staff if you have just added them by accident and they have never used their account. In reality, if the member of staff has used their account, they will be associated with all sorts of things (obs, comments, likes, reports, groups and lots more) inside Tapestry and deleting them would cause things to break. We are currently in the process of changing things around so that they work as you've said you expect. In the meantime I recommend that you just leave them inactive for the moment, and soon we'll have a much better deletion process in place.

If you send us a support ticket we can restore the observations for you.

The right one is definitely the only one that's enabled. I wonder if it's because you're accessing Tapestry through a login link to the wrong account. Could you please submit a support ticket marked for my attention and we'll try to get it sorted out for you?

Could you please send us a support ticket? We'll figure out what's going on with the transfer.