Storypark and HiMama: Digital Documentation in Early Years
New Technological Approach to Documentation
One of the many roles of an educators is to create pedagogical documentation of children's development and learning. This is an essential part of understanding children's thinking and is reflective of the children's strengths, interests, and areas of improvement. According to an article by Anne-Li Lindgren (2012), it explains how pedagogical documentation acts like a developing portfolio that contains how children express themselves, their perception of their world, and their experiences (Lindgren, A-L., 2012, p.332). Educators can document through various mediums such as photos, videos, and audio recordings. With new technology, applications like Storypark and HiMama allow educators to not only organise their documentation for each child, these apps act as an interactive tool for the child's home life. This is revolutionary for digital documentation because it builds a stronger home-school relationship and offers a new line of communication with the child's parents/carers. What can also be said about these digital documentation apps is that because of the constant updating and reporting, it can take time away from direct interactions with the children (Lindgren, A-L., 2012, p.336). I believe that the same can be said when using other mediums of documentation, and even more so because educators would have to manually compile their records, taking up more time. As a result, the key focus of pedagogical documenting is that there must be a balance of direct interactions and observations (Lindgren, A-L., 2012, p.336).
I have reviewed the top two digital documentation apps for early years; Storypark and HiMama.
Image from Storypark (2017)
What I did admire about this app the most is that it allows permanent access for the child's family members beyond them leaving the classroom or learning centre. The app is organised in a way that is adaptation to any type of family (for example, two accounts for separated parents). However, what is questionable about this app is that there are no early childhood professionals directly involved in the development of Storypark, therefore digital documentation app does not hold a strong connection to pedagogical documentation. This app is specifically designed for the parents and control of who has access to their child's portfolio.
Storypark empowers parents to be involved in their children's learning.
Image from HiMama (2017)
Unlike Storypark, this app was developed by early childhood professionals and the ambassador who presented this app to our class also had a background in early childhood which made the app more applicable to the topics that we have been learning about in our class and program in general. What separates this app is that it provides a variety of tags, including tags that educators can create themselves. These tags are all connected to the ELECT document and they are currently developing tags that are connected to more updated educational documents. I like this digital documentation app because it has more of a pedagogical approach and provides more areas of documentation, for example the children's well-being and health. This lets family members know how their children are emotionally and builds a stronger rapport with the educator. Of the two apps, I am in favour of HiMama because of its background in ECE professional development.
