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Hi Weavers, December’s newsletter is reaching you slightly earlier this month in an effort to catch you before you all break up for your well-deserved holiday. We have made a few new additions to Tapestry, so please do read on for more details. Your Data You may have noticed an extra button appear when you click your username’s drop-down menu. It’s called ‘Your data’ and it’s there to help all of our users get more information about their rights relating to their data on Tapestry. Relatives, staff, and managers can all access this screen by clicking on their username when logged into the browser version of Tapestry. Children who are using Tapestry’s Child Login feature can access a child-friendly version of the ‘Your Data’ screen by clicking on their name in the top left. Select and delete media in bulk. When you are editing an observation via the browser version, you can now ‘select all’ the media in bulk and delete them in one go. You’ll be able to untick any that you didn’t want to select before you click the delete button, so this should save you time when you’re deleting all but one or two pieces of media from an observation. For example, when you’ve made a group observation and uploaded a picture of every child doing the activity, then split it so you only have to type up the text once, but you only want to have one child’s picture in each version of the observation. We hope this change will make your lives a bit easier! Memo Notifications This development will make things simpler for the relatives on your account. If you have set it up so relatives receive an email about a new memo that you’ve posted, they will now be able to see the contents of the ‘notes’ section of your memo within the email itself. Please note, if you have attached media to your memo, relatives will still need to log in to Tapestry to access that. Podcasts Our education team have been continuing to meet with some wonderful guests and recording their conversations for our weekly podcast. December’s lineup includes Jules and Stephen talking to Early Years consultant Leslie Patterson about the language of labels and how they impact children. Next up, Ben and Jules spoke with Head Teacher and Education Consultant Alison Kriel about wellbeing and the importance of belonging. And lastly for this month, Ben and Jules chat to Olivia Dicker, a Year 5 teacher, about how they are using the Child Login feature to support independent learning, foster parental engagement and celebrate children’s work at her school. You can listen to all our podcasts on Spotify, Simplecast and Apple Podcasts. Feature Focus Have you tried Child Login yet? Here are 5 ways Child Login can support children’s learning in your classroom: 1) Encourage children’s independence and pride in their work. Children can make choices about their learning, how it looks, what to include and where it goes. 2) Share and review children’s progress with them. Children can easily look back over their work and you can reflect together where they want to go next and facilitate their journey. 3) Set work for your children. Create activities that they can complete on their own or in groups. 4) Provide everything in one place: any videos, photos or documents your children will need can be uploaded ready for them to get started. 5) Children can share their voices and their learning via videos, presentations, photos and audio recordings. The only limit is their imagination! If you’re interested in how Child Login can help teachers and SLT, take a look at this recent article. We have also updated our infographics library to include 4 new infographics, all designed to help get you started. As always, we would love to hear your feedback about this feature. What works, what doesn’t work and how we could change things to make them better for you. Please send all feedback to customer.service@eyfs.info and one of our lovely product support team members will get back to you. Please note, our customer services are open 9-5 everyday except for bank holidays. Paying for Tapestry If you wish to pay for Tapestry by cheque or BACs, please can we remind you: Cheques - should be made payable to ‘The Foundation Stage Forum Ltd’ and NOT Tapestry or the Early Years Foundation Stage Forum BACS – we moved our service provider for our banking in October 2019 and our bank is now HSBC sort code 40 18 22 / Account no 42445565 Our old bank account with Lloyds will be shut soon so payments made to that account in error will not be processed. If you need further information, please email the finance team on bacs@eyfs.info If you do not deal with finance in your setting, please ensure this information is passed to the finance team so they can make sure their records are up to date. Thank you. Something to Try… Did you know that Tapestry comes with 5 different background ‘themes’? One of those is a Christmas theme, so if you fancy giving your Tapestry screen a festive feel you can change your theme by going to Control Panel > Settings > Theme and choosing a new one from the drop-down menu. Wishing you all a safe and peaceful Festive Season. The Tapestry Team

Hi Weavers, November has seen the weather in the UK turn colder, so we hope you’re keeping warm as we move into winter, even if you do have all your classroom windows open! It’s been an exciting month here at Tapestry HQ with the addition of the new Development Matters… The new Development Matters on Tapestry If you are an early adopter school, you will be delighted to hear that the new Development Matters is now available via the Tapestry browser. If you haven’t already, please take a look at this tutorial to see how to enable it. And this tutorial will show you how to get started. The release of the new Development Matters guidance signals the opportunity for change: a shift of focus away from burdensome assessment and towards professional judgement and spending time with children. In response to this, you will notice that the new DMs have been added to Tapestry in a new way. If you want a bit more information on Tapestry’s journey to adding the new DMs, take a look at Ben’s article which explains our thinking in more detail. Please note, the new DMs aren’t available on the apps yet – we are working on adding them at the moment. As always, if you have any questions or queries about this you can email us on customer.service@eyfs.info and one of our Product Support team will get back to you as soon as possible. Protecting you and your data We have recently made a change to stop people from accessing Tapestry if we can see that the connection between them and Tapestry isn’t secure enough. If you’re interested in what we’re doing technically, we’ve switched off connections to ‘TLS 1.0’ and ‘TLS 1.1’. You don’t need to know what that means, but you should know that this will help to protect you and the data stored on your account. This change only affects people accessing Tapestry via an Android mobile/tablet running Android 4.4.4 or below (this is the operating system for the device), or on a computer using a really old version of Windows/OS X which uses the ‘classic app’ or an old internet browser. If you have experienced an error recently (usually when trying to upload observations) then this is likely to be the cause! The solution is to simply update your browser or download the new app. The new app is called Tapestry Mobile and has a colourful logo and this has replaced Tapestry Classic. Please see this tutorial if you use an iOS device and this tutorial if you use an Android device - they will walk you through the new apps. Rest assured, everyone’s login information remains the same once you switch to the new app. Internet Explorer We will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 10 and below from the end of December. Old Internet Explorer versions have not had any security updates or technical support from Microsoft since December 2016 so we strongly recommend that you update to a more modern browser if you are still using IE 10, IE 9, IE 8, IE 7, or IE 6. The drop of support for old versions of Internet Explorer by us means that Tapestry might not work quite as well on them anymore. You may find the layout goes a bit odd and some sections and buttons stop working entirely. This is likely to get worse as time goes on and as we add new things to Tapestry. By upgrading your browser though, you can avoid all of those issues. Microsoft explain on their website how you can do that – just follow this link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/windows/end-of-ie-support There are other browsers available as well, so you might want to consider moving to another one entirely. We tend to use Chrome, Firefox, and (if we’re on apple devices) Safari, here in the Tapestry office, but there are quite a few options to choose from. If you’re using a mobile device/tablet you can upgrade via the app or play store. Podcasts We had some wide ranging and inspiring conversations in our November podcasts: Ben and Jules talked with Early Years ambassador Jamel Carly-Campbell about the importance of mentors and encouraging more Black men to work in the sector; our education team recorded two discussions – one about the new Development Matters on Tapestry, and another about Dr. Julian Grenier’s book Working with the revised Early Years Foundation Stage: Principles into Practice; and lastly, Helen and I chat with Annie Richardson about higher education and qualifications in the Early Years. You can listen to our podcasts via Spotify, Simplecast and Apple Podcasts. Something to Try… Have you ever considered doing your reading record on Tapestry? Earlier this year, I explored that idea and wrote this article – Three Ways to do Reading Records on Tapestry. I know some Tapestry users have tried this already with great success so if you’re looking for a new way to do your reading records, do give this a read.