In Peques and More Introducing Javier Peña de Kinder360, an application for mobile devices that aims to modernize and facilitate work in nursery schools and keep parents who take their children to these specialized centers in childhood informed. Javier is Informatics Engineer by University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria and associate researcher at the University Institute of Intelligent Systems and Numerical Applications in Engineering. Entrepreneurship has become something necessary in his life and he is passionate about developing an idea and seeing it evolve with creativity, motivation, effort and a lot of teamwork.
Javier will explain to us what are the main characteristics of Kinder360, what information does the application offer, how can it be used, why do parents find it so practical, what graphs and statistics about the baby's sleep and food does it offer. It is also an application that is designed for the whole family: fathers and mothers, Even grandparents! They can use it.
What is kinder360.com
Kinder360 is a School-Family communication tool that allows schools from 0 to 3 years to speed up the registration of the daily activities of children in the school and notify their families in real time. This application has been developed and successfully implemented thanks to the collaboration and advice of heads of children's centers, educators and parents.
Kinder360 not only represents a revolution in the method of monitoring the integral development of the child, describing how it is acquiring the basic skills of communication, body control, socialization, management of their emotions, and personal autonomy, but also allows parents to reassure regardless of where they are, because the information is transmitted by the center as soon as it is available.
Why the initial focus is children up to three years
Before launching Kinder360, we studied the market and observed that in the first cycle of early childhood education there were no solutions that expedited the communication process between the school and the family.
In this educational cycle, there is more demand for information from parents than in the rest of school courses, since it is the first contact that their children have outside the family nucleus and it is necessary to know their feeding program, hours of sleep, and body control.
Kinder360 allows parents to be reassured by informing them regardless of where they are
It should be noted that early observation constitutes the analysis of the behaviors, learning and expected advances in the evolution of children in the sociocultural context in order to favor development and organize the learning environment. The main objective should be to make parents feel that they are an integral part of the center and to achieve this, it must be done from the first moment when the children begin their educational stage.
Thanks to the good reception of Kinder360 in the first cycle of early childhood education, we are currently expanding the functionalities to cover the needs of children between 3 and 6 years (Second cycle of early childhood education).
How the idea of creating a baby monitoring system in nursery schools arises
The idea came up in December 2012 in a very simple way, one of our partners was a client of a children's center and arrived at the office with the daily report he received on paper. When the development team looked at this kind of information, they soon exclaimed How this is not sent in digital format! With this idea and the objective of offering families an improvement in communication with the children's center, we launched Kinder360 in September 2013.
How you collect data on the uses of nursery schools with applications
All the records made by the educational team are stored in a database and thanks to this information we offer a system where all these data are transformed into knowledge.
We are currently working on offering, on the administration panel, information about what Kinder360 learns each day, such as the percentage of attendance, the success of a particular menu or the early detection of irregular behaviors.
Why it is necessary to monitor what children do in nursery schools
Currently, the control of daily records in a nursery school is carried out through a paper agenda that is given to parents at the end of the school day.
The monitoring of daily records in a nursery school is managed using a paper agenda
Kinder360 offers much more information than a children's agenda and speeds up the daily activities of children, notifying their families in real time. These records are kept through Kinder360 Schools, an App that has been optimized so that the educational team saves time and effort, allowing them to dedicate themselves to the most important, serving children. What was once a task of locating each child's agenda among a mountain of paper agendas now, with no more than two “touches” of screen, the actions of one or several students are recorded simultaneously and the family is notified. The paper is fragile, it gets wet, it spoils, it gets lost, etc. and therefore a monitoring in this operation supposes the solution to a real problem.
How the technology you are putting into operation works to register, store, sort and obtain conclusions with all the information
Through the use of a tablet and a simple and intuitive application, the educational team of the children's center records the relevant actions and activities of each child's day. This information is stored in a database, so that parents and other authorized family members receive instant notifications on those devices connected to the system (smartphones, tablets or computers), without entailing additional tasks.
Who is helping you in the definition of children's learning patterns, do you have advice from pedagogues or teachers?
Kinder360 would not have been a reality without all the people who have selflessly collaborated with us. It all started as a pilot project in Pizquito, a children's center in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, where the first beta was born through the validation of hypotheses and interviews. We observed what work the school's teaching team did during the school day and what kind of information they pointed to every day on the agenda to inform parents. We immediately realized that this process could be streamlined and we developed an app adapted to the needs of the educational team, so that they could do in seconds what on paper required several minutes. The final product is the effort of Kinder360 Y Pizquito.
With which companies has reached agreements kinder360
Our main partner in this adventure is the Pizquito Infant School and we have currently signed collaboration agreements with Nursery School Associations, specialized web portals in the first cycle of early childhood education and companies whose market niche are parents of children between 0 and 3 years.
It should be noted that those responsible for Intel in Mexico have shown a lot of interest in Kinder360 to include it in an education suite that they will launch at the beginning of next year due to the great demand that has emerged in certain vertical sectors, such as education.
How the confidentiality of the information collected from each child is managed
Kinder360 communications are encrypted under the SSL protocol, an internet security standard. The data is stored on secure servers, the information being accessible only by schools and by the families of authorized students.
Who is your competition
Our main competence is the paper agenda, since many children's education centers have had this solution for many years and it is difficult to replace it with an information system, which changes the daily operation of the center. However, all our clients have adapted to the change without any problem and have verified the amount of time and paper they save over a day. The parents' response has been very positive since Kinder360 covers the need for a real-time demand for information.
Also in recent months, some solutions similar to Kinder360 have emerged, but we have decided to listen to the market, what it is asking for and to be able to give something in which the competition has not yet fallen.
How can parents know what kinder360 learns from our children?
Just as those responsible for a center can obtain detailed information on the data that is stored, Kinder360 users always have statistics on the behavior of their children. In this way it is possible to teach a pediatrician the evolution of food, body control or sleep hours and thus help to issue a diagnosis in case of illness, that is exactly what Kinder360 learns and shows it in the form of temporal evolution .
And here the interview with Javier Peña of Kinder360 (on the left in the image). I thank you for your generosity in the responses and for sharing with us your entrepreneurship and work experience in team with the Kinder360 application. It is very interesting as technology can be very useful and practical for parents and also for nursery schools that can also save a lot of time and offer a service highly valued by families. I wish him and the rest of the team many successes and we hope that his application can become a standard of attention and monitoring in the leisure and learning spaces to which we take the little ones.
Below you can see a report issued in the Canary Islands News explaining the operation of Kinder360:
