News in brief

• New Features
• Activity Infographics
• New podcast episodes 

Hi Weavers,

We hope you are all managing to stay well and safe during this difficult time.

All our staff are working from home, but we are still offering a full service for our Tapestry users. We have also been working hard to add new features and create resources to help you with your remote teaching and learning and ensuring you can stay connected with children and families.

If you have any ideas for tweaks to existing features or new features you think would be of benefit to you, please do get in touch with us by emailing customer.service@eyfs.info. Let’s start by taking a look at the new features we’ve been able to add this month.

Activities

This brand new addition to Tapestry provides you with a catalogue of activity ideas added by our education team. You can browse this catalogue, move activities to your own collection where you can also add your own, and plan activities based on these ideas. Activities in your own collection and in the Planned Activities section can be shared with relatives so they can complete the activities at home. Activities can then be linked to observations to show the journey of an idea becoming an activity that is then experienced by a child or children.

This playlist of videos will talk you through how to set up and use this on your account.

Scheduling

It is now possible to schedule posts on Tapestry (observations, memos and activities) to be released to parents/relatives at specific times of day and on specific dates of your choosing.

It is very quick and easy to do; this tutorial talks you through how.

Please note, this is only currently available on the browser version of Tapestry and the latest version of the iOS app. We are working on adding this to the Android app as well.

Audio Files

As well as photo, videos and documents, you can now add audio files to your observations, memos, activities and reflections of up to 30 minutes or 5GB on Tapestry.

This can be done by using the ‘Add Files’ button within a post. Whilst you can see and listen to audio files on the app, at the moment it’s only possible to upload these through the browser version. Remember it is possible to access the browser version through a phone or tablet, you just need to use a browser on your device.

App Updates

There have been two recent updates to the iOS app which include several new features such as clickable links, extended video limits, the ability to open attached files and the ability to schedule observations. To access all these new additions, you just need to update your app from the App store, the most recent version is 4.1.9. You can also read this post for more details.

We also have a new beta version of the Android app available which includes clickable links, extended video limits and the ability to open files attached to observations. This version of the app isn’t live to everyone on the Play store yet, but anyone can sign up to the beta. If you are interested in finding out more about this or signing up, have a read of this post.

Activity Infographics

We have had a fantastic response to our weekly activity infographics. We’re so glad so many of you are finding them helpful. Our activity infographics are a collection of fun EYFS activities that can be done easily with a child or children at home to support their development . Each week we take turns to focus on activities that correlate with either the Prime or Specific Areas of Learning.

They are announced on our social media channels (Twitter and Facebook) every Thursday evening and they can be downloaded from our Coronavirus info page. On there you can also download all the previous weeks’ infographics too.

Podcasts

We are still recording weekly episodes of our podcast on a range of topics to help you with remote learning during the lockdown, including interviews with other practitioners with their tips and advice.

You can find all our podcasts available on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts and over on our Simplecast page.

Feature Focus: Notifications

Now more than ever, it is important to maintain communication with parents/relatives at your setting. One of the helpful ways you can do this through Tapestry is by setting it so parents receive notifications when you add something for them to look at.

You can make sure you have this option enabled by going to the Control Panel -> User Permissions -> Relatives -> Notifications. The option ‘Receive Notifications’ will need to be set to permitted . If you have this option turned on and parents are not receiving notifications, you can look at this tutorial which will talk you through what to do.