Can you use tapestry without the assessments?

[EmilyYoung1]

Hi i hope someone can help or give some advice. We currently have an alternative assessment system that we use at my school, but still want to use tapestry to capture photos and observations. We have been up until a few months ago been adding the assessments to our observations, but were not using them partially during our data drop. Is there anyway that you can print off the observations and the photos but not include the assessments or COEL? We want to use it more as an electronic photo and observation capturing device. This Sep will also be the first year we are opening Tapestry to parents and again i would just like them to post the picture and write a comment. We also want to use it to send messages to parents/newsletters, but not sure how you do that yet either? i need lots of help? i hope someone uses Tapestry like we want to? 

Thank you in advance 

Emily 

[OlayaTapestrySupport]

Hi Emily,

Congratulations on your first forum post!!

Absolutely - you can export the children's journals to PDF and not include the assessments. For that, when going through the PDF export process as explained in this tutorial here, in the assessment section you will have to select 'Include all selected observations, but only show the following assessments' but then leave all assessments unticked:

When you then export the journal(s) the assessments will not be included as you haven't selected any. Then, moving forward, whenever you add observations you can simply not add an assessment.

There isn’t currently a function on Tapestry specifically for sending newsletterse to relatives, although it is very much on our to-do list for the future! Would you like us to contact you once this is ready?

For now, what you can do as a work around is set up a fake child and attach all relatives to this child. You could then add your messages as observations to this fake child with your content appearing in the notes section or as a picture file. When these observations are published, all relatives will then receive a notification about it and will be able to login and see the observation.

There are a few safeguarding issues you need to consider with this:

• If you have the permission 'View other relative's observations' enabled, then relatives will be able to see observations made by other relatives for the fake child even if they are not published in the journal. When relatives are adding observations, they will need to be careful to make the observation for their child only, rather than including the fake child in their observation.
• You can choose whether you want relatives to be able to comment on observations, but you can't say you want them to be able to comment on observations made for their child, but not for the fake child. If you disable comments for relatives then this would apply to all observations. You can however, specify that you want them to be able to comment on observations made for a single child, but not for observations where several children have been selected (group observations). So, if you're happy for them to not be able to comment on any group observations, what you could do is set up a second fake child and attach all the relatives to this account as well. Then when you add these type of observations, you could add both fake children. This would make the observation a group observation and would stop the relatives being able to comment on it. Being able to do this though is dependent on whether you have enough child spaces free in your account to add the second fake child. 

Please let us know if you have any questions about this.

Best wishes,

Olaya