Tadpoles Parent

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This app is seriously lacking some basic functionality, specifically parent teacher communication via messaging. The closest thing I can find within this very basic app are ‘Drop Off Notes’. You can send a message but only before your kiddos are checked in. After check-in, drop off notes is no longer available! It’s not the app of choice for communication between teachers and parents throughout the day. I get a photo notification during the day and sometimes a message that is usually some kind of overall center announcement and that is all. I can’t send a message and I don’t see what the kiddos are up to all day until they are checked out. A very lackluster app when compared to other similar apps out there.

I love the convenience of this app for daily checkin (we used to manually fill this info out on a sheet of paper at drop off) and ability to keep all my kids daily records in one place (gives me the ability to go back and check sleep habits of my infant etc). HOWEVER it’s buggy and doesn’t always update properly. I usually can close the app and reopen, but this doesn’t always fix the problem. Ideas for future updates-I would love the “food provided” section to be more user friendly (allow me to select multiple food items at a time or store meals that I often send together. Also I’d like to indicate which meal the food is intended for- for example I’d like yogurt served at “lunch” or as a “snack”. Right now teachers don’t know what food should be served when and just have to guess. Also it would be great if teachers could add reminders to the app that “pop up” for parents when filling out info for the next school day. For example when we are asked to bring in more wipes, that message appears on the daily report, but might be missed or forgotten by tomorrow. I’d like the previous day’s teacher notes to pop up the next day while filling out that days drop of notes. Maybe even with a check box to indicate it was completed. Hope that makes sense!

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If I could give 0 stars I would! My child was at another daycare that used another app & I loved it so much that when I had to change daycares I made sure they had an app but this one looks the same but I don’t get real time notifications like the other one did. Not knowing how my child is doing throughout the day when I have known constantly every diaper change, feeding, how long the nap was & got to view photos & videos throughout the day of the activities that they all did as a class put me at ease. This instead does nothing for me. It’s useless. I don’t know if any of the information is true or if the teacher just quickly added in the details before the daily report was sent out. Which in the end is making me want to just change daycares completely because I need this reassurance throughout the day. Not just one notification that I dropped off my own child! This is completely pointless & useless!

It would be more helpful if I could choose an alternate view of my baby’s schedule. As is, I see all diapers in one section, all meals in one, and all naps in another. To make the most sense of the info, I’d like to be able to see it in chronological order so I don’t have to piece it together. That would be helpful in trying to figure out, for example, why she didn’t eat for 3 hours and then look to the other sections to ascertain that she was napping, etc. Also can be a wee glitchy and the swiping of pics generally doesn’t work. And it takes a long time for the reports to load/refresh. Would like a way to communicate with the teachers real time. As is, we have to text outside of the app if we have questions for one another.

I haven’t read the reviews so I don’t know what prior complaints are about but for us, this app works well for what it does. I like having all of my daughter’s drop off notes and fun photos from her day in one place and I also like being able to mark/report absences with a button touch. The ability to write daily notes is also nice. I’m deducting one star because the navigation is a little painful ie not as intuitive as perhaps it could/should be but the app works well for the function it’s designed for in my opinion and as I’ve never had the ability to use an app for this purpose before I think it’s really cool.