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.