As an early childhood educator, parents are entrusting you with their precious babies. In doing so, you are expected to wear many hats– a coach, a mediator, and a teacher to name a few. But probably the most important role you have is as a communicator. You need to be a good communicator with your students and peers, but maybe most importantly with parents. While this can be a daunting task, approaching communication through a variety of avenues is manageable and makes all the difference in strengthening your partnership with parents. Read more…

If you’re in the early childhood education field you probably know that there is an ever-increasing amount of networks and online sources for ECE professionals to get the latest news and resources. I’ve personally gotten to know quite a few experts in the ECE field and can recognize when there’s good content that needs to be shared. So we’ve decided to start a monthly newsletter geared specifically to helping Early Childhood Education professionals find that content. Read more…

Is preschool a worthwhile investment for our country? This will certainly be a hotly debated topic over the coming years in light of Obama’s Preschool for Every Child initiative.

The folks at Education News have put together a nice infographic (scroll to end of post) that supports the case for preschool.

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Early childhood learning programs thrive when the adults– parents, teachers, and administrators– communicate well. Of course, as a professional, you probably already know a LOT about great parent communication. This webiner will help you apply what you know using digital strategies. Read more…

Have you ever managed a waiting list? It can be a cumbersome process. Especially when you have complicated rules like priority based on membership status, families or employees, managing a waitlist can be a time-consuming, tree-killing process. Enter BumbleBee Software. It’s billed as childcare waiting list software but it could easily be used for any type of organization that consistently deals with waiting lists. Read more…

Join us next week for a Free webinar.

In this 30 minute online webinar Matt Harrell will demonstrate how Hayes Barton Baptist Preschool uses MemberHub private group communication software every day for effective parent-teacher communication and family engagement.

Register for a session now by clicking a date below: Read more…

Our friends over at The Early Childhood Technology Collaborative (ECTC), a group of three very insightful early childhood technologists, have a new survey that we want to encourage our ECE customers and friends to fill out. This is the first survey “in a series of very topical, focused questionnaires.”

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Early childhood learning programs thrive when teachers and parents collaborate. Getting parents engaged and involved at your school is challenging and that’s why ECE leaders are coming together on Twitter Wednesday night at 9:00pm ET to discuss this topic. You should join the conversation. Here’s the deal. Read more…

In our last post we established that Early Childhood Learning programs can and should use the standards put forth in NAEYCs accreditation process as a benchmark for which to compare their communication efforts. At the end of that post we suggested that the type of communication channels you provide can be the difference between 1-way communication and real communication, two-way communication. So what are the strategies that you put into place to foster parent-teacher collaboration? Let’s look back at the standards. Read more…

Does your organization hold up effective communication as an important strategy to success? How do you measure how effective your communication efforts are? (Actually I really would love to know how you’re doing that, leave a comment). In many cases, leaders will look to successful organizations and mimic their communication efforts and styles. Well in the case of Early Childhood Education (ECE), you can strive to live up to the standards. You know, the NAEYC standards. Read more…