Business & Tech

Grand Lake Mom's Grand Idea: How Preschools Can Keep Parents 'in the Loop'

A new tool lets child care providers update parents throughout the day, with photos delivered to a smartphone or tablet.

Most working parents ask themselves the same questions at times throughout the day: What's my child doing right now? Is she having fun? Is he learning something new? Did nap time go well or restlessly? 

Anne Gordon, a Grand Lake area resident with two daughters under 4, aims to make it easier for preschools to provide parents with real-time reports on their children's day.

Gordon is one of the founders of Kinderloop, which provides a Facebook-like feed to the parent's smartphone or tablet. 

A provider uses her own phone or tablet to snap a photo and tag the children, and parents are automatically updated via their phones or the Web, Gordon says. Easy tagging and voice recognition technology built into phones means the whole process takes only a few seconds, she says.

"The teacher's eyes stay where they're supposed to be: on the children," Gordon says.

"Schools are using it for so much more than photos — they're posting meal calendars, keeping track of developmental goals, and getting feedback about their programs," she says. 

Dan Day, an Australian who is one of Kinderloop's other founders, said in a television interview that the Kinderloop network is extremely secure, so children's photos can't end up on an Internet site unexpectedly. 

Parents can, though, authorize a preschool to provide logins for other family members, so grandparents, for example, can also be kept up to date, Day said. 

Gordon, a former full-time attorney, had created her own preschool-to-parent communication app when she met Day and Dan Walker, who were developing Kinderloop in Australia. The three joined forces, and Gordon now specializes in business development for Kinderloop.

Gordon says local preschools that would like a free trial of Kinderloop may contact her at anne@kinderloop.com.

"I will personally come by and set up their school," she says.

Gordon continues to teach part-time at the UC Berkeley law school, to run around Lake Merritt and to sing ("increasingly poorly," she says).

For more information, see the Kinderloop website.

For a report of Gordon's experiences as "not your typical hackathon attendee" at San Francisco's AngelHack last March, where her preschool-to-parent app made her one of the top two finalists, see "How to Win a Hackathon (even if you don't)."


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