If you’re new to Storypark, or use it in a basic way but want to learn what else it can offer, this guide is for you.

Note: To get the most out of this guide, you should already be part of a service with children and educators invited. If you haven’t yet done this we recommend following our handy implementation plan to get set up.

If you prefer to learn by watching rather than reading, then our free Introduction to Storypark workshop covers similar information.
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In this guide, you’ll explore:

Our purpose is to help every child fulfil their unique potential, by connecting and empowering the community around them.
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Storypark is informed and shaped through the guidance of our advisors, international experts and leading practitioners.
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Storypark has a unique heritage that shapes the way we think. All of the founding team’s Mums have long careers in early childhood education and continue to guide Storypark’s thinking.
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Whereas most digital learning portfolios are centre-centric (only accessible while a child attends a centre), with Storypark parents can access and manage their child’s portfolio, for free, as they develop from birth to school, even after they leave a service. This supports important transitions and a continuous learning journey for each child.
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Privacy and child safety are core Storypark values. Storypark is password-protected and only a child’s primary guardians can invite family to access their child’s information and stories. We invest heavily in security so your information and communication with families stays safe. Unlike other platforms, Storypark doesn’t own your stories and information, we simply store it for you. If the content was yours to begin with, it remains yours after you put it into Storypark. This helps control each child’s digital footprint.
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Storypark is the most trusted platform in Australasia and beyond, and works with most of its leading providers. This means you can be confident we’ll be around for a while and that our security, processes and privacy have been thoroughly tested.
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Resources:
​About Storypark
​Video: The story of Storypark
​Your information and how we use it
​How your information is kept secure
​Ownership of information
​Cybersafety information
​Our commitment to child safety
​What information can different people see?
​Storypark’s privacy policy

Storypark helps you:

Learn more at storypark.com/teachers.

You can access Storypark in a number of ways:

"I would suggest just getting onto Storypark, you can’t break it. Click on the buttons, try something out, and create a draft. Just practice as much as you can. I created a ‘child’ with my name and then wrote stories about my own teaching as a way of practicing what I wanted to write, and to work out how different things looked. If possible, find someone who knows more about Storypark and ask them for some ideas and support. This is ideal if they are only one or two steps in front of your learning because then they are strengthening their knowledge by teaching it to someone else.
​– Kath Cooper, ECE lecturer
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Every page in the web app has a Need help? tab at the bottom right.

When you tap on this, it shows:

"Have a play... Once you’re in there you’ll see how easy it is to use! If you get stuck, visit the help centre and enter the issue. 9 times out of 10, it’ll take you to information that helps!”
​– Michela Homer, Regional Professional Services Manager LNI, BestStart

 
For more support and training resources, visit storypark.com/support: 

Here you can:

“The Storypark help site has excellent workshops and resources to get you started. I’d suggest for centres to make this a part of their new educator induction process and allow for their first non-contact time to participate in the 'Introduction to Storypark' workshop."

Tapping the top left Menu button will open a sidebar that will let you navigate anywhere in Storypark. This is what you’ll see:
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Latest activity: What’s been happening in your Storypark community. All the latest stories, posts and comments will show first.

Draft stories: Any stories you’ve created but haven’t yet published.

Pending stories: (will only display if you are an approver of stories). Any stories that have been submitted for approval and are awaiting your approval to check and publish them.

Your educator profile: As an educator, you have your own profile where you can manage your settings, and view your conversations, child stories, and portfolio stories you’ve saved as evidence for your appraisal or teacher registration. You can access other educators’ profiles by going to your service’s Teachers page, and tapping on that educator's name. Learn about inviting educators and making an educator an admin.

Your own children’s profiles (Note: only applicable if you use Storypark for your family use). Learn about using Storypark as a family member.

Early learning service profiles of any services you are a part of. If you tap the service name you’ll access all of its content and see a list of any rooms that have been set up. You can access:

Room profiles. A room is a group of educators, children and their families within your service. Room profiles show similar information to service profiles with the exception of learning sets and an About page. You can create as many rooms as you like and can be used, for example:

Resources:
​What are rooms and common FAQs
​Set up a room
​Access a room
​Add an educator or child to a room or multiple rooms
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Each child has their own profile page where you can edit their details, view their stories and notes, access any plans they’ve been added to, and see which family members have been invited to their profile. You can also see their birthday and any other services they attend.

Resources:
​Add child
​Edit or remove a child
​Children’s profiles, stories, plans and notes
​When a child leaves
​What can people see when a child attends multiple services
​Export stories and notes of archived children

You can view the family members who have access to each child’s profile. For privacy reasons, educators can only invite two family admin (usually parents) to a child’s profile. Once they accept, they manage the child’s profile and can choose who else is invited to it.

Family admins and non-admins have different levels of access to a child’s profile. Whereas non-admins can only view and respond to stories, family admins can also:

It's recommended that all parents become admins so that they can jointly manage their child’s profile and be involved in the day-to-day happenings of your service.

Resources:
​Family infosheet
​Inviting parents
​Welcoming parents to Storypark
​Invitations – accepting and consenting
​View a child’s family

Storypark offers different ways for people within a community to engage with one another. Build community with community posts, privately message people through conversations, and discuss matters about a child through private notes.

Click Create in the navigation bar at the top of your screen and choose your communication method:
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A message to a child’s immediate learning community (only educators and family admins; wider family cannot view these). This is a great place to build community and share what's happening to get families involved – notices, reminders, daily/weekly summaries, current interests, ideas of activities to do at home, events, recipes, introducing new staff etc. Families can also create community posts but you can turn this feature off if you wish. Responses on community posts can also be turned off.

An email notification gets sent whenever something is posted but families can turn this off if they wish. However if you select the Announcement checkbox an email will be sent regardless of whether they’ve turned this off. We recommend only using announcements for urgent matters like the service needing to close. Only admins have this feature.
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Private messages between educators and/or family members within a learning community. Conversations allow educators and families to talk privately about things without it contributing to the child’s profile or educator's portfolio.
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Private communication between a child's educators and family admins that show on a child’s profile. Notes can be given a category eg. Goal or Aspiration to allow easy filtering. You could use child notes to ask about a child’s learning at home, let a parent know about an incident, share resources and ideas to support the child, or link together notes and stories so you can show and support a child's progression over time.

For tips and strategies on using these features, see our guide on Strengthening family engagement.

Stories are a tool that help record and communicate children’s learning with family, early learning services and eventually school, providing greater insight into each child.

Services around the world record and communicate children’s stories in vastly different ways. Storypark is built in a flexible way that can incorporate all types of learning and curriculums.

A learning story might include examples of a child's strengths, interests, development and knowledge. Images, videos and audio of the experiences add to the richness of the story.

The story editor lets you add children, text, images, PDFs and videos, and make links to your curriculum or learning outcomes with ‘learning tags’. You can save a story as a draft, or publish as an individual or a group story.
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Stories can be created, viewed and responded to by both educators and families. The story editor is a flexible tool that could be used to create:

"When you're just getting started, read other people’s stories and jot down what appeals to you about them. Are they clear and well formatted? Where do they put the photos? Do they ask parents questions? What is the content in the story? Then just practice. Add learning tags so you can find what you wrote easier. E.g. you could create a tag for all your practice stories called ‘practice’ then when you are looking for one, just search for that tag.
​– Kath Cooper, ECE lecturer

Resources:
​All about stories
​Create story
​Uploading images and videos
​Adding learning tags
​Spell check
​Saving a draft story
​Story approval
​Family stories/moments

See our quality practice guides on Taking great photos, videos and notes and Creating rich assessment.

When you create a story about children, everyone who's been invited to those children’s profiles will receive an email and will be able to view that story. No other people will have access. 
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Published stories can be viewed on the profile pages of a child, an educator, a room and your service. You can use the filter to find or group published stories by story type, child and learning tags.

Resources:
​Finding published stories
​Linking stories together
​Duplicating stories
​Family stories/moments
​Exporting stories when a child leaves
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Educators and families can respond to any story or message using text and/or images. To encourage responses, educators should explain to parents the benefits of responding, and how to do it in a way that extends their child's learning. Here are a few ways to respond:

When a parent responds or shares a story, acknowledge this by responding in Storypark or face-to-face. This lets them know you value their contribution, big or small. To encourage family feedback ask a question in the story, e.g. ‘Have you seen this at home?’ or ‘Where did this interest come from?’.

Resources:
​Add a comment
​Child comments
​Audio comments
​Child’s voice audio comments
​Photo comments
​Add a comment to a child note
​Add a comment to a community post

For more tips and strategies, see our quality practice guide on Strengthening family engagement.

You can print any published story, either for a child’s profile book, a wall display or to keep as evidence. 

A preview page will open where you can change the size and position of images and text on the page and then print or save as a PDF. We recommend waiting until people have finished responding to the story before printing it so you can include the responses in your printed copy.

Learn more about Set up your browser for printing and Printing stories.
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Activity reports provide insights into activity and trends happening at your service. 

Reports show:

Learn more about activity reports.

Once you’ve mastered the basics of Storypark, we recommend exploring the planning area, which offers a flexible way to plan across all aspects of your practice – programme/curriculum planning, ‘All about me’ sheets, QIPs, internal evaluations, annual plans, appraisals, transition reports, summative assessments, meeting minutes and more.

To learn more, see An introduction to planning. We'll also be covering this in a future quality practice guide.

Your personal and account settings can be accessed by tapping on the settings cog at the top right of the screen.