What are Virtual Areas?
"Virtual Areas" are configurable places for children to be moved to. When a child is moved to a virtual area, this movement will be logged on your attendance reports and the child will show up as moved to that area on the attendance Dashboard. Virtual areas can also be used for "name to face" recording.
Create as many virtual areas as needed by your center!
Note: Virtual Areas are for tracking purposes only and aren't the same as classrooms. Teachers will not be able to log into a virtual room as updates will still be done from the home classroom.
Examples of When to Use Virtual Areas
When to Use Virtual Areas
If you need to make a note that a fire drill was done, or children were moved to another area within the center, such as the playground or lunch room, virtual areas are the best way. Simply create a virtual area for each of these on-site locations.
When to Use Check out / Check back in
If children are physically leaving the property and you don't want this time to contribute to the child's time at your center (e.g. going to school, going to an appointment, going on a bus run, etc.), you should use the Check out option. If they will be returning, make sure not to send the report yet! You can also optionally add a note to explain why they are checked out. Then when the children return, you'll check them back in again.
Setting Up & Using Virtual Areas
Step 1 - Visit Configuration (Admin)
An administrative user will first need to configure Virtual Areas so they can be available for teachers to use. Login as a director, click "Logins & Configuration" (found in the bottom-left of the sidebar menu in the app). Click/tap to open the "Virtual Areas" section.
Step 2 - Create Virtual Areas (Admin)
Click "Add a virtual area".
Name this virtual area (e.g., "Fire Drill", "Lunch Room", "Playground 1" etc).
Add as many areas as needed, there is no limit!
Click "Save".
Step 3 - Move children to areas as needed (Teachers)
When children are checked in and need to be moved into a virtual area, you can move them from the attendance screen on the home screen:
Or from the updates screen, for easy group name-to-face reporting:
Click HERE to learn more about name to face tracking
Step 4 - View attendance logs
Movements to virtual areas will automatically be logged in your attendance reports, and the current location status for each child will be shown in real-time on the classroom/center dashboards.
Comments
7 comments
If I set up a virtual area for a fire drill, is it necessary to "move" the children back to their main room?
Good feature. We just recently started using HiMama and it is good to see that it is updated
frequently.
It would be great if these were more like classrooms! That way we can pull up an area and know exactly how many are in the nap room at one time!
Thanks so much for your feedback, Country Kids Day Care :)
Hi Batavia,
If you have children visiting your classroom, and then you move the visiting children with your homeroom children to a virtual area, your attendance page will show that there are no more children in your classroom. When moving all of the children back from the virtual area, you'll want to make the update from the children's homeroom(s) to move them from the virtual area. I hope this helps!
Hi Junior Buckaroo Academy,
You can now see the staff:child ratio on your admin homepage for virtual areas as well! I hope this helps :)
Some trouble when I have children transitioning from the younger classroom, into my room, and I take them outside. When I “move” them to this virtual area, the children I had in my room transitioning, do not show up on my group moves to click their picture. Technically on the app I have two children that are no longer with me. In their younger classroom it shows they are in the virtual area, but not in my classroom. It just shows my established children.
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