Hello and welcome to our November newsletter
If you’re considering using Tapestry Online Learning Journal but aren’t yet a customer, take a look at how it can help you transform learning outcomes for children in EYFS right through to Year 6 - click a link below:
If you’re already a customer, read on for our latest news and updates, including:
- Resources to support your CPD
- Resources to support and champion wellbeing
- Important information about security and safeguarding on Tapestry
- A quick note on some recent changes to Amazon Fires
We hope you enjoy catching up on our news, and as always we welcome your feedback.
Best wishes,
The Tapestry Team
Resources to support your CPD
For our regularly scheduled podcast episode this month Ben and Jules chatted with Hannah Clifford, founder of Seren Kids, which provides children and adults with digital skills and e-safety knowledge. Hannah shared a wealth of knowledge and ideas about children and technology. You can listen, and find links to loads of useful resources, here.
This month also brings you a new Beginner's Guide, written by early childhood specialist Kerry Murphy. Download the ‘Beginner's Guide to Self-directed Neurodivergent Play’ here.
Kerry is running a course for Early Education this month, titled Supporting Neurodiversity, Disability, and Special Educational Needs in the Early Years. The first of 5 sessions begins on 14th November. This is part of the Early Education Learning Circle which offers the opportunity for in-depth, tailored professional development through facilitated peer learning. You can find out more here.
Lastly, we'd also like to tell you about a set of resources that Laura Henry-Allain MBE has written to support her new book, My Family, Your Family, illustrated by Giovana Medeiros. You can access the resources from this link.
Resources to support and champion wellbeing
Early Years Wellbeing Week took place at the beginning of October. In recognition of this important week to reflect on and engage with educator wellbeing, founder Kate Moxley has created a new free resource: Championing Wellbeing, a Toolkit for Early Years Educators. The toolkit, which can be downloaded here, is designed to help guide practitioners in reflecting, evaluating and building their own bank of practical ideas for promoting compassion resilience. It includes information on how to promote wellbeing in your setting, support wellness action planning, promote professional dialogue around wellbeing and much more.
Professor Eunice Lumsden and Warda Farah joined Kate, along with Jules and Stephen from the Tapestry education team, in a special edition of our podcast for Early Years Wellbeing Week. Their discussion centered on an intersectional approach to cultivating wellbeing, and you can listen to it here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
This is a good moment to remind you of the Beginner's Guides written by Warda and Kate, and of the Mandela Model Workbook written by Eunice - you can download them from the links below:
A Beginner's Guide to Intersectionality in the Early Years by Warda Farah
A Beginner's Guide to Educator Wellbeing by Kate Moxley
The Mandela Model Workbook by Professor Eunice Lumsden
Important Information About Security and Safeguarding on Tapestry
Whenever you're adding relatives to your Tapestry account, we recommend taking the following security and safeguarding precautions as you do so. And if you've already added lots of parents, it is still worth checking through this list:
- Have you double checked your relatives’ email addresses to ensure they are correct? It’s important to ensure these are correct because if an email is entered incorrectly and belongs to someone else, they could gain access to the Tapestry account by resetting the password.
- When considering the security and safeguarding around your Tapestry account it’s also worth thinking about your passwords. Tapestry accounts are only as secure as the passwords that protect them. It’s important to never share your Tapestry password with anyone else and to ensure your password is as strong as possible. You can read current government advice about password setting here. If you are the only person using a device to access Tapestry and the device supports Face ID or fingerprint unlocking we would recommend enabling these for the Tapestry app (this will make it quicker and easier for you to login as well!).
- Have you checked how your User Permissions are set on your account? These control what non-manager staff and relatives can do and see on an account so it’s worth ensuring these are set up appropriately for your setting. Once you’ve checked these you may also want to set up a fake parent account for yourself and login to this so you are clear what parents can see from their end.
- It’s also worth taking the time to check what users you have set up on your account. If you still have staff, parents or children on your account who no longer need to be there, we would recommend deleting them to ensure you are in line with your data retention policy.
- Are relatives linked to the correct children? Children and relatives have to be manually linked together on Tapestry in order for parents to be able to see entries on Tapestry for their child/ren. When you do this it’s important to ensure the correct children are linked to the correct relatives otherwise parents will be able to see entries for other children. This tutorial talks you through how to link parents to children.
A Quick Note on Some Recent Changes to Amazon Fires
It appears that Amazon have issued an update to their Gallery/Camera software which prevents users from uploading multiple bits of media at the same time. As this is something Amazon have changed themselves, regrettably it's not something we're able to control.
However, if you use the Tapestry app to upload observations you can still select multiple items of media if you choose to select media from the 'Camera' folder.