We are happy to announce our partnership with Childminding Ireland. We will be focused on helping offer quality education to children, add value to the service provided by Childminders to parents and significantly ease administrative tasks associated with the day-to-day activities of childcare professionals.
What is Childminding Ireland?
Childminding Ireland is a progressive organisation seeking to leverage opportunities which:
- add value to members
- improves education quality for children
- supports and informs parents
- supports the strategic goals of the Organisation.
Childminding provides a home from home environment and continuity of care, with small numbers and an age spread of children replicating family life and promoting empathy among children. Childminding by nature is organic and leads to lasting relationships contributing to the holistic development of children. These are widely recognized as essential elements of quality childcare.
The prevalence and immediacy of smart technology offers greater than ever possibilities for Childminding Ireland to enable quality supports and provide tangible evidence of engagement. Evidence based information strengthens Childminding Ireland’s position within the early years sector, helping achieving quality goals.
Why is ChildDiary important for Childminders?
ChildDiary is a social media platform created by childcare professionals looking to comply with regulations and simultaneously engage parents in their children education to ensure positive learning outcomes.
With ChildDiary childcare professionals can document daily records (attendance, nappies, sleep times, meals …), capture and plan learning stories linked to their curriculum or simply share photos and notes with parents privately and securely.
Paper diaries can become something of the past, ChildDiary ensures information is always available for the childcare professional and also to parents and families which can now have a unique view into their children’s development.
You can read Anne Ryan’s (Childminding Ireland Board Member) testimonial on ChildDiary below.
Testimonial
- Applicable to all aspects of Childminding businesses
- Appropriate, enabling safe and efficient sharing of information with parents
- Approved, complies with Data Protection requirements and supports Inspection compliance
ChildDiary allows you to create a secure online profile for each individual child in your care. One of the main aims of ChildDiary is to increase communication with the children’s parents or carer, this is done by allocating parents/carers an access code to allow them to log in and read the learning journals and other information posted by the childminder about their child.
Main Functions: a Daily Diary, a Learning Journal and an Announcements facility.
The Daily Diary allows you to record information about each child individually such as time of arrival, sleeps and nappy changing. It also allows you to add information as a group for example if all the children ate the same lunch then instead of noting it in individual child records, simply tick the group box and all profiles are updated simultaneously. The daily diary can then be sent by email to the parents at the end of each day.
The Learning Journal is a fantastic way to record individual child development you can add in photographs to the journal, document next planned steps for further development and with a few simple clicks you can link the activities to the Aistear curriculum.
The Announcements Facility allows you to message the parents about something that is happening in your service. It’s great for reminders too.
I found ChildDiary to be very easy to use once I had been given the introduction to it. I used ChildDiary through my laptop, iPad and also iPhone and didn’t have any issues with access on any platform. All the information held about the children is stored on secure servers and can be accessed via ChildDiary until the children are 21 years old.
I would definitely recommend the ChildDiary to any Childminder, particularly those who enjoy having an online presence. It is very easy to set up and straightforward to use. Parents enjoy being kept up to date about their child’s progress and as they are able to log in at any time they can enjoy reading the information in their own time.
ChildDiary would be particularly helpful to Childminders offering the ECCE programme as it provides valuable links to Aistear within the Learning Journal. A valuable for all Childminders is that it allows you to plot a learning course for each child.
Anne Ryan, Childminding Ireland’s Board Member
