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