eyLog is early years Log – An EYFS Compliant and Secure Online Learning Journey. It is an integrated web and tablet based secure application for nurseries and childcare providers to easily capture observations and manage the learning and development journey of a child in an electronic format. eyLog is helping nurseries transform the process of recording observations and creating a child’s learning journey – drastically reducing the time and effort spent on capturing and maintaining observations manually, and enabling practitioners to focus more on providing the best early years education, an ultimate aim of both nurseries and parents.
eyLog is a application that runs on a tablet PC (or simply “tablets”) and on web. Practitioners/Nursery staff can use eyLog running on these tablets to capture photos/videos/audio clips and to complete an observation of a child including linking the observation to EYFS assessments. These observations taken on the tablets are saved to eyLog’s central servers and become an integral part of the child’s learning journey which can be accessed from anywhere. eyLog also provides a “web application” i.e., an application accessible through your web browser (such as Internet Explorer or Google Chrome). Practitioners/Nursery staff can access the observations saved from the tablets here to update or complete them at a later point in time as required. Room leaders and Nursery managers can also login via the web application to review and add onto these observations. eyLog also provides a one-stop view of all the observations recorded and extensive charts to the Nursery owner and administrators for all the settings within the nursery chain.
All data is stored on secure cloud-based servers which are hosted in a UK data centre.
Yes. All data is regularly automatically backed-up at data centers located here in UK. The back-ups are stored on separate servers and not on the production server.
Nurseries
Yes. The eyLog application on the tablets use the WiFi connection to connect to the internet and to upload the data to the eyLog servers. However, there is an offline mode available to record observations even without internet connectivity like outdoor visits to the garden/forests.
No. All that is needed is a web-browser (which every PC has). You can access eyLog from anywhere where there is an internet connection.
At a minimum we recommend having one tablet per group or room. At the other extreme, you can have one tablet per nursery practitioner. If a room has more than 2-3 nursery staff, it may become difficult for the staff to share the tablets, in which case you might want to have at least 2 tablets in such groups.
No. We don’t see any need to! The idea is to eliminate post-its and paper cuttings. All observations can be taken on eyLog. We also have a possibility to mark an observation as a “Quick” or “Spontaneous” observation when you want to capture some interesting moment. Many assessment frameworks are supported and are continuously being added which eliminates the need for any paper based observation/assessment
No. You do not need to have a separate camera to capture photos. Practitoners can record rich format and high quality media using eyLog tablets. No more printing and cutting of photos to attach to the observations!
Yes. Practitioners can capture photos, videos and audios to a child’s observations. More so, multiple media evidences can be added to an observation. Using our eyLog and recommended tablets, these media are captured in rich format and are of high quality.
Currently it is possible to use eyLog as a regular camera to capture photos/videos without any WiFi connection. To complete the observation and save it, a WiFi connection is needed. For this reason, it cannot be used in areas where there is no WiFi connection. However, we are very soon releasing a new version of eyLog which will have full off-line capability. With the new version, it would be possible to take observations from anywhere. Once you return to the nursery or as soon as a WiFi connection is available, the tablet will automatically be synchronised with the eyLog server and all data will be saved on to the servers.
Yes. eyLog nursery application runs on iPads (iOS 7 and above) and Android tablets (Android 4.1.2 and above). The parent app is available on mobile phones and tablets on both iOS and Android platforms.
eyLog offers, as an option, especially configured Android Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 tablets. These tablets come with a custom firmware in which all applications, except for eyLog, have been removed from the tablets. This ensures that the tablets cannot be misused in any manner – for example, it would not be possible to use Facebook to post observation photos or to send such photos by e-mail. Moreover, these tablets are insured against any damage and faults.
Yes. eyLog allows nurseries to incorporate Characteristics of Effective Learning in your observations and thereby help you to focus and understand how the children learn in your nursery, thus enabling you to plan the child’s activities to better support its learning.
Yes. eyLog also supports Leuven Scales of Emotional Well-being and Level of Involvement to assess the emotional intelligence of the child as well as the extent to which the child is operating to its full capability.
Yes. eyLog has full support for ECaT. Directly from the observation taking screen, ECaT assessments can be set and photos/videos can be added to the ECaT assessment as evidence. eyLog also provides a tracker for ECaT which allows you to assess & compare the progress of the different children on ECaT within your settings. Statistics based on gender, group, etc., are also available.
Yes. eyLog allows you to customise the observation sheet and its elements (Observation, Analysis, Notes, Comments, Assessments) as per your nursery’s requirements. This enables you to move onto the elctronic version smoothly and helps you and your staff to continue focus on a child’s learning and development without any pain of getting used to a new format.
Yes. eyLog has a built in review process – Room leaders and senior staff can review the observations recorded by lesser experienced staff before they are finalised and submitted. Observations can be submitted in ‘draft’ mode where they are available to be updated at a later point in time. Draft observations are not included in the learning journey of a child until they are finalised and submitted.
Yes, indeed! eyLog allows nurseries to share a child’s learning journey with parents. Nurseries can decide to grant access to the parents by registering them on eyLog. Multiple parental log-ins can be created to share the online learning journey with grandparents, carers and other relatives if required. Not only can parents view their child’s observations recorded at the nursery, they can also contribute and add their own observations to eyLog. Parents can also add comments and interact with the Practitioners in real-time about these observations.
Parents can only see their children against whom they have been setup as a parent by the nursery manager/staff. They cannot access the learning journeys of other children.
Parents
Check with your child’s nursery to see if they are sharing the learning journey with the parents. Most nurseries do! The nursery should register you as the child’s parent on the system. Once that is done, you will automatically receive the log-in details by e-mail. In case you haven’t received this mail with the account details, please also check your Spam folder as some mail servers may accidentally mark our system mails as spam.
On the log-in screen, there is a link labelled “Forgot Password?”. Click on this and enter your e-mail ID. If you are already registered on the system, the system will send you a mail with a link to reset the password. Click on the link and follow the instructions to reset the password.
Yes. More than one person can be registered as parents/carers of a child and all of them would then get access to the child’s learning journey. Whenever observations are added to the learning journey, notifications would be sent to all the registered parents.
No. If you are registered as a parent for both the children, then once you log-in to eyLog, you will be able to view both the children, look at their learning journeys and add observations/comments through the same log-in.
Observations added by parents need to be reviewed by the nursery staff before they become part of the child’s learning journey. Check with your child’s key person at the nursery in case your observations haven’t been reviewed even after a few days.
Security
We use Rackspace which is UK’s leading cloud provider. Please refer to Rackspace’s Security and Compliance policies for more details. Only the core eyLog team have access to the individual production cloud instances.
All communication between the tablets/servers/browsers is through HTTPS and encrypted using SSL (Secure Sockets Layer). You will see the green bar in the browser indicating HTTPS (encrypted) communication.
No. The names of children/practitioner, etc., are all stored in secure databases which are not accessible to any search engine. All access to nursery data is protected by user-IDs and passwords preventing any search engine from crawling them.
When a child exits the nursery, the nursery has the option to remove the child from the system. They or the parents (depending on the nursery’s policy) can download the entire learning journey including photos/videos/etc., as an e-Book. Once the child is removed from the system, the nursery/parent have 30 days to request for this e-Book after which all data of the child will be permanently removed from the system.
There are a fixed number of previous backups saved at any given point in time and the older ones are over-written as new back-ups are created. Access to these back-ups are available only to the core eyLog team.
Pricing
No, all our prices are exclusive of Value Added Tax (VAT)
Yes.We have a minimum 12 month license contract for all our products.
Yes. We have top-ups available for every 50 children beyond 200 children at £5/month or £50/year per software. This translates into just £1 or less, per month per child. Please contact us to customize the top-ups as per your requirement.