This month, we’re excited to announce the launch of several new features on the Daily Connect platform. These features are now available across the Daily Connect web, tablet, and mobile apps, and are designed to make life easier for the childcare professionals who use Daily Connect every day.
We’re confident that the addition of these new features will help our customers to run their childcare operation more smoothly. The new features save staff, teachers, and directors time, as well as helping childcare centers to better satisfy local licensing requirements.
We’ve released three new features. They are:
- Name to Face Attendance
- Sleep Check
- Customization for Food Entries
As always, these features have been added to existing Daily Connect accounts at no additional cost.
Let’s explore each of the new features in more detail so that you understand exactly how you can start using them in your own childcare setting.
1. Name to Face Attendance
Our new Name to Face feature enables you to quickly check student attendance using individual pictures of each child – rather than just a list of names.
You can use the Name to Face feature for taking attendance in the classroom after students have arrived for the day, at regular intervals during the day, or at special events, like a field trip.
This makes it easier for staff to quickly take an accurate attendance for each and every child, meaning they can spend less time on administrative tasks, and more quality time with the children.
The Name to Face feature is only available for users with a Premium+ or Professional+ subscription. To start using the Name to Face feature in your Daily Connect account, go to Settings, select Customize Home Page, and enable the Name to Face feature.
Once this has been activated, your staff can then tap the Name to Face icon on their Daily Connect app, take a quick attendance for the classroom, and then save the entry. This is only visible to classroom staff and directors – not parents.
2. Sleep Check
Nap time is an important part of the day at many childcare centers – it’s an opportunity for teachers to plan ahead, catch up on administrative work, and take a breather. But teachers are still responsible for children during nap time, and have to check in on them regularly.
Classroom staff can now save ‘Sleep Check’ entries to document that they’ve checked on a child during their nap. You can use this feature to satisfy licensing requirements in your local area, or even just to record information about the child’s nap that you can share with parents.
When you’re using the Sleep Timer function, just click ‘Save Sleep Check’ to save an entry. If you’d like, you can add an optional note which will also be saved.
3. Customization for Food Entries
Tracking how much each child eats is important for childcare centers. It’s information that’s invaluable to parents, and also important for each child’s health. That’s why we’re making it easier for childcare professionals to accurately track the amount of food each child eats while at daycare.
You can now customize the four different labels available for the quantity of solid food that a child eats. The default settings are shown below, but it’s possible to change these categories to anything you like.
You can customize these labels by navigating to Settings > Customize Labels > Solid Food Quantity.
More New Features on Daily Connect
These new features come in addition to a wide range of new features launched in late 2021 and early 2022. In case you missed them, here is a list of the new features that we launched on Daily Connect this past December and January:
- Parent Billing: Faster ACH Transfers
- Message & Incident Report Approval
- Ability to Disable Video Uploads
- Share Photos in Push Notifications
- Combining Entries Saved for Multiple Children
- Text/SMS Messaging Available Globally
- Private entries and notes
- Increased length of SMS messages
- Improvements to observation and assessment reports
At Daily Connect, a lot of the ideas we get for new features come from childcare professionals just like you. If you have an idea for a new feature that would make a big difference in the way you run your childcare business, we’d love to hear it.
You can reach out to us at support@dailyconnect.com with your ideas. We look forward to hearing them and continuing to invest in new features that make Daily Connect even better for our users!