News in Brief

• Getting support for your Tapestry account 
• GDPR updates
• New Tapestry package sizes
• Tapestry training sessions
• New features

Hi Weavers,

Welcome to this month’s Tapestry newsletter. Hopefully by now everyone affected by the recent cold weather and snow has recovered! This month we have been able to add lots of great new additions to Tapestry, you can read all about these in the ‘New Features’ section of this newsletter.

Getting support for your Tapestry account

In order for us to be able to support you and your Tapestry account for the upcoming changes in data protection law (known as the GDPR), it is very important that you ensure we can contact you quickly when necessary.  We strongly recommend that you take the time to read the email we sent out earlier this month (available here) and take a look at the resources linked within it as these will help you make sure your account details are correct and up-to-date. A summary of the contact details we need to be up to date is available here. As explained in depth in our new draft GDPR contract, your contact details are held securely and privately, and will enable us to assist you in your obligations under the GDPR.

GDPR update

As mentioned above, the GDPR is due to come into force very soon (May 2017). We have been in regular contact with you regarding this, explaining our data protection, access and data location details so that you can incorporate these into your GDPR obligations as data controllers. Our draft contract has been updated in line with your feedback, and the final version will be released in April. In order to continue using Tapestry this contract will need to be accepted by you. We are confident that the work we have been doing since last year ensures that we are compliant with the GDPR as your data processors. If you do have any final comments or queries on this, please do contact us at tapestry.support@eyfs.info.

New Tapestry package sizes

To help larger settings using, or wishing to use Tapestry, we have created two new package sizes. These are up to 210 children and up to 270 children. They were added so that the jumps between the larger package sizes were not so substantial. You can find the prices of these new packages on our web store page. 

If you are currently using Tapestry and want to change to one of these packages, you can upgrade your account at any point in the year, this tutorial explains how to do this. If you want to downgrade to one of these packages you will be able to at your next subscription renewal. You will just need to drop us an email to customer.service@eyfs.info and one of the team there will be able to help you with this. 

Training Sessions

If you would like some extra, bespoke, support for your Tapestry account, you might be interested in setting up one of our remote training sessions with one of our Tapestry experts. These cost £30 +VAT per half hour and we can run them any time between 9:30am-4:30pm (UK time), Monday-Friday. In these sessions we can cover any areas of Tapestry you are not sure of and we can also answer questions you have.

If you would like to find out more information about these, or would like to request a session, you just need to contact us by emailing tapestry.support@eyfs.info. 

New Features

Montessori Summative Assessment screen

For those of you using the Montessori framework on Tapestry, we have now added a Summative Assessment screen, similar to the one available for EYFS. From here you will be able to see each child's current stage for each activity, as well as for previous periods. Just like the EYFS Summative Assessment screen you can manually override the assessments from here too. This tutorial goes into more depth about how to find this screen and what the information on it shows you. 

Merge Children function

Occasionally on Tapestry it is possible to end up with multiple accounts for the same child. This can happen if a child moves setting, both settings use Tapestry and the child is not immediately transferred across. Having two accounts for the same child can get rather confusing so we always recommend either deleting one of the accounts or merging the two so you only have one account for the child. You can manually merge children’s profiles (by editing observations to change which profile they’re attached to) but that can be quite a time-consuming process. So, we have now added the ability to merge two children’s accounts together. If this is something you need to do on your account, or you just want to learn how to, you just need to follow this tutorial.

Bulk export observations

Although it is already possible to export observations within a child’s learning journal, we know some of you would like to be able to export specific observations, or a selection of them made for different children, rather than a child’s whole learning journal. So, you can now bulk export observations from the Observations or Assessments page on Tapestry. If you want to learn how you are able to do this you can take a look at the tutorial we have created for this here.