Archive: Providers

(Almost) Wordless Wednesday – Action Day Nursery School at Moorpark

Last Thursday, we visited Action Day Nursery School at Moorpark in San Jose, CA. Here are a few of my favorite things from the day.

Little Minds, Big Development

Early Childhood Brain Development

We believe early education and care is important – that’s pretty obvious. But, even with all the time we’ve spent around early education and care, we are still amazed at the power of a child’s mind. It is what makes early education so important. The Harvard Center on the Developing Child has a great graph that reminded me how truly amazing these little minds are if we nurture them right.

Early education matters

How are you fueling your child’s development?

Child Care and Early Education Conferences in Summer 2012

List of Early Childhood Education, Preschool, Child care, and Daycare Conferences for June, July, and August 2012

See the Child Care and Early Education list for all of 2012

Are we missing a conference? Have a correction? Contact us!

Are you a Pinterest user? Here is a pinnable version of the list.

WIN – just by posting on MomTrusted!

Get your own Online Provider Business Card

How do you Promote Your Profile with your very own Provider Widget?

It’s easy!

1. Just login to your MomTrusted.com account and click on the “home” tab at the top of the page.

2. Use your mouse to select the Widget Code from the Your Widget Code box.

3. Copy the code from the box by holding down the Ctrl button on your keyboard and clicking on C (button on your keyboard) at the same time. (OR you can normally right click the mouse and choose “copy” from the menu that pops up).

4. Now go to your website, facebook profile, or wherever you are going to put your widget. Paste it there by clicking in the text area (somewhere you would be able to type text normally). You can paste by holding the Ctrl key and the V key at the same time OR right clicking in the text area and selecting “paste” from the menu that popped up.

Use your MomTrusted Personal Provider Widget to professionally link to your profile. Here’s an example:

Your widget shows your profile picture, provider name, provider type (facility, preschool, nanny, babysitter, inhome), the number of positive parent reviews you have, the first few lines of your descriptions, and links to your child care or preschool profile. This way new parents can easily find more information about your services and your current parents can quickly leave reviews. It’s like an online business card for your child care business or preschool!

Here’s a few other ideas for how to use your child care or preschool profile widget, use it in
– your email campaigns to your current parents
– your email signature
– classified ad postings across the web (craigslist, facebook, etc)
– your classroom blogs
– your website
– your signature on forum and chat sites (cafemom, momslikeme, babycenter, etc)
– all your social networking profiles (facebook, myspace, bebo, friendster, hi5, orkut)
– all your social media sites (youtube, yahoo profiles, bookmarking sites, etc)
– ANYWHERE you promote yourself on the web! (if you have other ideas we would love to hear them!!)

If there are any places that do not allow you to use your provider widget code but will allow you to put a link to your website or profile…simply click on “View My Profile” from your “Home” tab (after you login on MomTrusted.com you will automatically be directed to this page). Once you are on your public profile, copy your unique url from the address bar of your internet browser. It should look something like this:

http://momtrusted.com/in_homes/3243-NannyMable

Use this url as your own personal website to allow new parents to get important information about your services quickly.

If you have any problems please feel free to contact me! :)

Exciting New Features for Providers

Exciting new features for child care centers, preschools, inhome providers, nannies and babysitters!

1. Invite Parents to Get More Reviews

Now, from your home tab you can invite your current or past parents to MomTrusted.  When you get your parents to your profile you can substantially increase the number of reviews you have!  Invite them by searching your email contacts and selecting the appropriate people OR entering them by hand from your offline email list.

2. Get Your OWN Facebook Page

When someone “likes” your profile on MomTrusted we send it over to Facebook to get you more exposure.  When a parent clicks “like” that page is sent to their Facebook profile where all their friends and family can see that they like your services.

Don’t want to wait around for someone else to “like” you to get on Facebook?  You don’t have to!  Just go to your profile and click the “like” button.  Once your page is on facebook ANYONE can connect to it and learn more about your services.

3. Have a Question?  Confused about something?

Give us your Feedback!  Now from every page you can click on the “feedback” tab on the right hand side.  Here you can ask a question, give a suggestion, or tell us how great we are ;)  Never feel stuck again, let us know what’s going on and we’ll get back to you or fix the problem as fast as we can!

Early Education Gets a Boost

Parents and early education providers are in a unique position right now. We have the opportunity to help, encourage, push our State’s to increase their investment in Early Education & Child Care. Legislation passed on September 18^th (H.R. 3221, or the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2009,) allocates over $1 billion per year for the next 8 years to Early Education. Every dollar moving into Early Education is a step in the right direction, so we are very excited to see this happen, although we would always like to see the investment be higher.

The Bill allocates the $1 billion per year to States in two areas, based on the following guidelines.

QUALITY PATHWAYS GRANTS, as awards to high-capacity states pursuing models of reform and excellence in early learning. Innovative plans would already reflect significant progress toward establishing the elements of a comprehensive, high quality early learning system needed to improve quality and learning outcomes for children, and a desire to take such improvements to scale

– DEVELOPMENT GRANTS, as awards to a set of states that show promise for strengthening and expanding their early learning systems, but need additional assistance to launch a standards-based, outcomes-driven system. see ed.gov

This funding is on top of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Feb 09), which included $5 billion for Early Childhood. This Bill is directing funds toward Head Start, early Head Start, preschool grants, child care grants, and special infant programs.

Not all States will benefit equally from this funding, however, and likely several will not receive any help. So, as parents, child care providers, and preschool educators we can influence where this money flows. Contact your State’s Department of Education and Governor and find out what they are doing to receive these funds and what programs they intend on funding. Politics aside, Early Education has significantly trailed other areas of education investment even as research continues to demonstrate its important role in education and career achievement. Funds are coming and we need to make sure they are put to good use.