Preschools all over the world are now using the ‘Evidence for Learning’ app to improve the way they capture, document, and share the children observations and achievements with their parents
The Hub Preschool in South Australia is just one of many Preschools around the World that have chosen to use the ‘Evidence for Learning’ app to save valuable time and money when producing the required documentation and reports for their parents and learners.We would definitely recommend using ‘Evidence for Learning’ app.
Di Hogg and Moira Smith from The Hub Preschool (http://www.hubpre.sa.edu.au)
Effective documentation and reporting cycle
One of the Preschool’s key aims in their improvement plan is to add to their effective planning, assessment, documentation and reporting cycle for large, and small groups, and individual children. Educators’ skills in documenting the children’s learning, skills and interests have also been enhanced.Using the Evidence for Learning app it has improved ease of:
- Educators regularly sharing documentation for each child.
- Each child’s ILP (Individual Learning Plan) their goals and interests being reflected in the teaching program.
- Adding Learning Stories to each child’s Portfolios which provide Evidence of children’s learning, skills and interests to be matched to their ILPs
- Making available documentation for both children and families to view and add comment.
Reviewing their options
About 5 years ago, The Hub Preschool, along with several other sites, were involved in IT program trials designed to capture the children’s evidence using a variety of time saving tools and resources. It was a great start but not refined enough. Since then they have used other programs, and they too, while good, were still limited as they didn’t support delivery of the desired whole process with a minimum of steps - from capturing evidence to emailing to families or as hard copy for the children’s Portfolios with easy inclusion of the Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF) elements and the National Teacher Standards. They commented that the Evidence for Learning app has significantly decreased the number of steps from capturing information to final delivery.Getting more out their iPads
With the discovery of ‘Evidence for Learning’ app the Preschool utilized existing personal iPads and purchased more for other educators, taking up the ‘School Subscription’ option of registering 5 iPads for unlimited Reports for 12 months.What makes the ‘Evidence for Learning’ app so great to use?
According to the Educators at The Hub Preschool, The reason that the ‘Evidence for Learning’ app was so attractive is that it gives us the ability to not only add the EYLF and the National Teacher Standards elements to the captured evidence, but it also allows us to easily document and then share this evidence with our parents and the children. And they look so professional, uncluttered, clear and smart! The app is child inclusive and simply supports our ‘face-to-face’ time with the children.Supports ANY Assessment framework
The ‘Evidence for Learning’ app has a Framework Library that contains an 'open' collection of education, curriculum, and assessment frameworks from around the world. It even allows users to upload their own custom frameworks. As The Hub Preschool educators say, We find the framework library excellent as it has allowed us to quickly and easily use not only the required EYLF Framework elements against observations, but also the Australian Curriculum F-2 as this relates to our teaching also – this is so, so easy!
Further, new Federal Government regulations require teachers to record our professional development against the National Teacher Standards to retain our teacher registration and thus legal permission to teach. We have downloaded the National Teacher Standards framework into the Evidence for Learning app on our iPads and are including relevant Standards’ elements in the children’s reports with just the press of a finger.
Easily Produces ReportsFrom the teaching floor, learning journeys, child profiling, and progress tracking documents are produced on demand and then sent to a printer, to email, to a cloud-services provider such as GoogleDrive, Dropbox or OneDrive ... or directly to other apps installed on your iPad.
To save time all reports are exported to our laptops at work and then printed altogether. All printed reports then go into each child’s Portfolio, and these are shared on a regular basis with the parents. What’s great is that the children also share them independently with their parents too. They often peruse their own Portfolio and share with their peers during their preschool session. The app has made the accuracy and authenticity of the Reports so easy because the ‘drafts’ and ‘published’ observations can be easily revisited and edited before creating a PDF for printing or emailing.
Helps with planning
The ‘Evidence for Learning’ app will even allow you to quickly check a child’s progress and identify which areas of EYLF are yet to be achieved. Thus allowing you to plan useful, relevant activities right there and then.
The tracking grids allows us to monitor at a glance for both EYLF and the National Teacher Standards, respectively, how many of the elements have been addressed, and if we are balanced or top heavy in an area. The way the grids are laid out also, at-a-glance, allows comparison of all children on EYLF grid and all Standards’ elements on that grid. …… how good it that!
Free Trial
The Hub Preschool started with a free trial but ‘that only really whetted our appetites! It’s awesome how quickly we can use the app to capture moments, allowing us to get on with face to face work with the children. We already have three members of staff using the ‘Evidence for Learning’ app on a daily basis, and the other 2 are in the process learning how to use it. The response we get from the Teacher Cloud support team has been absolutely fantastic.
Subscription
The Hub Preschool has now moved to the school subscription model. This has allowed us to personalise the documents we send out to parents with our Preschool logo. We make many reports for and with each child – it’s the way to go.
Next Steps… and plans for the future
- To improve our family inclusion. We are increasing the number of parents/carers we email the reports to because we have restricted face-to-face contact with many of them due to their work commitments - the children are brought to and from preschool by intermediary people, eg, child care, family day care carers, and grandparents.
- Evidence volume. We are in the process of refining our selection of photo evidence, written context and educator comments for each Report to get the main message across without being too wordy. This has improved our speed of evidence selection as we don’t want to go back and edit if we don’t need to – all time saving strategies.
- Continue to embed EYLF, AC F-2 and National Teacher Standards elements in our memory – the more we remember the quicker it is to add them to each Report. The app gives us ready access to these elements.
- Teach other interested educators who have expressed interest.
About The Hub Preschool
The Hub Preschool is a government funded preschool located in a bustling ‘hub’ within Aberfoyle Park, 12 kms south of the city of Adelaide. Split across two sites they have 5 staff and a small enrolment number of approx. 60 children. Families are mainly drawn from the local area, with some families living further away and using the ‘hub’ on their way to and from work.
The Hub Preschool is a centre of high quality where children and families are at the heart of all they do. They believe parents and families are the first educators and thus support them as preschool educators. With a very similar philosophy to that of the ‘Living Classrooms’ set up by Claire Warden (www.claire-warden.com) The Hub Preschool believe play is fundamental to children’s learning – the true pathway for children to express their ideas and feelings and engage in exploration, imagination, experimentation and manipulation.
Read more case studies...
Becky Iredale - ChildminderThe Willows Childrens Centre - Portsmouth
Little Gruffalos, OFSTED registered Nursery - Wakefield
The Hub Preschool - South Australia
Ferndown First School - Dorset
Wilson Stuart (A Special Academy ages 2-25) - Birmingham
Le Murier (Secondary Special School ages 11-19) - Guernsey
St Christopher's International Primary School - Penang, Malaysia
 |
|