Learning stories about an individual child are the most common form of documentation on Educa. This article covers how to create a story, add formatting, then save as a draft to review later, or publish - share with families, save to the child's portfolio and post as evidence for compliance if you linked to frameworks.

On a phone.

More on creating stories on your mobile device here

On iPad or desktop. Select Create Story button in your sidebar and choose the child you wish to write a story for.

On the Create Story page, get creative. Upload a few photos, a video and files to make your stories interesting, add background colours and consider using one of our many fonts to create a nice title that will make a difference if you print the story later.

Engage parents by posing questions to the reader, encouraging them to comment.

If you've added photos, move them into a position that fits your story. Simply hover over the image and click on the orange Click or Drag button. This will show a number of blue lines, signaling where your photos can be placed.

If dropping your photo into a line of existing photos, all the photos in that row will automatically resize. If you then remove a photo from that row, the photos will return to their original size.

You can also move your photo to sit to the left or right of your text.

Click on the image will reveal your image toolbar. This allows you to make further changes to your images, including adding a border.

Reflect on the learning and uncover deeper insights by utilising the additional text boxes. These reflections can be supported by adding photos to these text boxes. 

The headings of these text boxes can be updated by Site Administrators through the site settings to better support your centre's aims.

Provide further contexts for learning by linking into relevant framework goals, which can be managed through your framework library. Educa presents full frameworks for linking so you are reminded of your linking options.

Link to plans created in Educa by selecting the plan from the drop down list. Only plans you have created for that child will appear.

You can then decided to send an email notification to all of the child's family and profile teachers by checking the Send Email box.

You can also mark the story as a day journal by checking this box. This will exclude the story from reporting, so is often used for daily updates which aren't focused on the child's development.

At the bottom of your page you will always see three options:

Cancel will close the story without saving it. 

Draft will save your story to the child's Draft Stories on their profile page, which can only be accessed by educators.  This is handy if you'd like to add some formatting or more detail later. You can access this story from your My Stories page in your teacher profile - available on the Educa sidebar.

The final option that you will see depends upon your publishing permissions as an educator. You will see "Submit for Approval" or "Publish." 

If you have Story Approval turned on then you will see the option to Submit for Approval. This will send your story to one your reviewers to look over before sharing it with families. The reviewer can either send it back to you to rework or publish it. 

If you see the Publish option, clicking will send to families and educators linked to the child immediately. 

If you want to add a story to a child's paper folio, send it home in a backpack for folks without Internet or put on a wall, once a story is published, you have a number of printing options.

You can remove default title header (good idea, if you have a nice title in your story), backgrounds, borders, change page sizes and decided what to include. More about printing options here

Formatting stories - here

Group stories - here

How Story Approval works - here

Printing - here