New: Observations and Assessments

We’re very excited to announce several major enhancements to our Assessment feature, which is now much more flexible, customizable, and useful.

Our previous Assessment category has been replaced with a new category named Observation. An observation is where you’ll assess the progress of the child toward mastering a skill.

Customized Assessment Levels

The number of levels for the assessments can be customized from 2 up to 6 levels. Each level named can be customized. Here are a few examples of assessments that you can set:

Meet / Not Meet,
Expected / Emerging / Exceeding,
Not Assessed / Not Observed / Developing / Not Mastered / Proficient / Advanced.
Responding / Exploring / Building / Integrating

Multiple children selection, multiple skills selection

Same as for all Daily Connect categories, an observation entry can be recorded for several children. This saves a lot of time to childcare staff. A different assessment can still be set for each child within the same observation. For instance, if 4 children are doing the same activity, but only 2 of them have mastered the underlying skill, you can easily and quickly indicate those different assessments.

Multiple skills can also be selected from the learning framework for the same observation.

Set a different assessment for each child on the same observation

Privacy

Observations can be hidden to parents, and only visible to the childcare staff. An observation can also contain notes visible to everybody (parents and staff), and notes only visible to staff.

Learning Frameworks and State Standards

The new observation framework can be used with any customized Learning Framework defined in the application. Custom topics and areas defined with a previous Daily Connect versions are also automatically available on the new framework.

Daily Connect now also implements several common Learning Frameworks and US State Standards that can be used for observations.

Domains from Minnesota Early Learning Standards

Observation Reports

Our observation report allows to easily view the progress for each child and also quickly set final assessments in case no recent observation has been recorded for the skill.

The color-coding allows to quickly view how proficient the child is in each skill, and which skills have not been assessed yet. Childcare staff can use it to understand which new activities and lessons need to be developed to improve the appropriate skills.