Three reasons you should be using Playground to help your childcare centre succeed
Running a childcare centre is a complex and demanding task requiring significant staff effort and time. Typical duties such as attendance management and child observations can become overwhelming, leaving you with less time to focus on providing quality care to the children entrusted to you. Educator apps like Playground provide a more efficient way of managing these tasks and streamlining daily operations at your centre.
Playground, a childcare software platform for educators developed by Australian company Xplor Education, is designed to support the needs of educators to help them succeed. The platform offers a range of tools and features designed to streamline day-to-day tasks, enhance communication between staff and families and promote child development. It also includes a range of learning and development resources to support children’s education while helping parents stay informed about their child’s progress quickly and easily, ensuring they never miss a moment.
Time-consuming tasks and manual processes can slow down your centre’s workflow. These challenges can cause frustration and burnout among staff, ultimately impacting the quality of care you provide to children. By using software to streamline these processes, you can get back to the reason you became an educator in the first place—the children.
Playground offers you a wealth of benefits, but the top three reasons you should be using Playground are to simplify admin work, stay compliant and increase parent engagement.
Streamline programming, planning and documentation
Admin work takes up the bulk of your time as an educator as you strive to log observations, document what goes on with each and every child’s day, and ultimately, organise that data into accessible records for future use. By adopting Playground at your centre, you can easily document each child’s daily activities through Observations.
Whether on an excursion or singing in a group setting, you can take photographs/videos and write short notes describing what’s happening in them. In addition to the visual aspect of the Observations feature in Playground, educators can tag specific Learning Outcomes that are relevant to the activity being observed. Additionally, these are all stored in the cloud to be used as evidence during your next assessment.
Documents and Tables are two other features that help educators with their admin work. Playground also now includes these programming and planning tools in the app, making it easier for you to plan even when you’re not in front of a computer. With Documents and Tables, educators can create, share and track each child’s learning journey efficiently, as well as report on each child’s progress and learning outcomes much more quickly. Canvas allows you to add more creative touches to planning papers, making them more visually appealing.
Stay compliant
Compliance with the National Quality Standards (NQS) is critical for childcare centres in Australia. However, documenting evidence of compliance with government standards can be overwhelming for educators already burdened with numerous responsibilities. Playground offers an effective solution to this problem by providing a streamlined approach to meet compliance requirements.
Playground helps you manage complex administrative tasks such as child attendance, creating learning journeys and health checks to name but a few. Having access to these tasks in one platform not only frees up time for you but also allows you to demonstrate compliance with the NQS by having every logged sleep check, toileting event and nutrition event stored in the cloud. These can be shared with parents or easily retrieved for assessors when needed.
In addition, Playground allows centres to securely store all their documents, observations, attendance records and incident reports in one place. Documentation and organisation have never been easier with Playground. With just a few clicks, you can stay on top of your compliance requirements and be ready with all the necessary documents
Increase parent engagement
With Playground, it’s easy to keep parents informed via its messaging and notification features that allow you to provide real-time updates, photos and videos to parents. Seeing their child’s progress throughout the day can help parents feel more connected to their child’s experiences at the centre. This seamless communication helps build trust and create a stronger relationship. These interactions are also stored in the cloud for future proof of parent engagement during assessments.
Playground can also help improve communication with parents and increase their engagement in their child’s learning and development through features such as direct messaging. Ad hoc messages allow for faster interactions between you and parents, especially if time-critical updates, such as when a parent is running late, need to be communicated.
Another helpful feature is the observations that educators record through photos and videos. This feature helps parents stay informed about their child’s activities and progress, as well as the targeted learning objectives from each activity. Frequent updates throughout the day help ensure parents never miss a moment, helping them feel close, even when they’re apart. Additionally, the software can help you create and share learning plans, providing parents with insights into their child’s development and encouraging them to get more involved in their child’s education.
Adopting Playground at your childcare centre simplifies time-consuming tasks, complies with government-mandated standards and increases parent engagement. These benefits can help improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of your service while also providing a better experience for parents and children alike.
Playground truly is an efficient and invaluable addition to any childcare centre. Not only will it enhance your workflow and help you achieve compliance with the NQS, but it will transform how educators manage their daily duties.
If you’d like to know more about how Playground can make your life easier as an educator, click here to book a free demo. Our team will gladly walk you through the platform and answer any questions you may have about Playground.
Zeus Martinez
Marketing Content Specialist
