The Newsfeed: Purpose and Settings
Purpose of the Newsfeed
The Newsfeed is your center's virtual hub for community engagement. It is interactive, and meant to truly bring to life staff <> parent relationships.
It might look like your Facebook or Instagram feed (which parents love!).
Posting on the Newsfeed is an easy way of keeping parents and staff informed about what's going on at your site each day. A post lets you to write quick messages, add pictures, videos or documents, and more.
The Newsfeed can be accessed:
via the Home → Overview as a teacher/staff member communicating from the context of a room tablet, performing room logging and parent updates
via Home → Newsfeed
The Newsfeed is the first and default icon from mobile, when logging into Famly as a director/teacher/staff member or parent (screenshot below)
💡 Did you know? Newsfeed posts can also be sent and received as SMS! More on SMS via the Newsfeed here.
Settings
Control how you share information in the news feed via:
⚙️ Settings → Communication → Newsfeed
Settings include:
Language translation: see below
Privacy setting: If a parent comments or likes a post in the News Feed, this setting allows you to control how much of their names are visible to other parents and staff.
Photo download: Allow parents to download photos from the app. Famly recommends this is turned on, as most parents want this capability.
Live Translation
Turn on live translation to allow staff and parents to translate messaging into their preferred language - more details here.
Creating a post
When writing a newsfeed post, you can choose who you would like the post to be written from. For example, you can choose:
Yourself (you cannot post as another member of staff)
A room or group
The center
Just click on your name at the top of the post to open up your options:
Next, add your recipients by selecting them from the recipients drop-down.
💡 You may notice that the name of a room appears twice - that's because you can select children and staff separately.
Last, send your post!
Utilize rich text features to draft a Newsletter or emphasize parts of your post:
✨ And use Sidekick (AI) for in-app support on grammar and spelling, making your writing more formal or more conversational, and streamlining any review processes for posts! ✨
Send a post to checked-in children
💡For teachers and staff: save time by sending post to checked-in children or all children in your classroom. Do this via Home → Overview → Classroom.
You can also send a post to children who are currently checked in to the center. To do so, go to your Overview (the home icon in your sidebar) and click on the checkmark icon to see children that are currently checked in
Click Select all children → Send → Post
Now, all children currently checked into the center will be the selected recipients for that post.
Adding an attachment
On each post, you will find a Upload button. Here you can attach:
A picture... or LOTS of pictures!
You can upload all major image file types to Famly, including .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .pdf etc.
Please note, .heic files are not supported and these will have to be converted to a supported file type locally. If you are using an Amazon tablet, you can go into your camera, swipe over the screen from the left to right and a camera and video will appear. On this screen if you look to the right side there is a small cog looking sign (settings) click on this then ‘Resolution and quality’. Find ‘Image Format’, and change the format from HEIF to JPEG.
The maximum image size is 200kb, with a maximum resolution of 2560 x 2560px
Total photo limitations are very high - you are able to send many photos at once via the Newsfeed
Videos
You can upload all major video file types to Famly, including .mov, .mp4, .avi etc.
Please note, audio files such as .wav or .mp3 are not supported
The maximum video file size is 1024mb
File limitations are very high - you are able to send very long videos via the Newsfeed
Documents
There's no file size limit on resolution, but images will be resized to fit within a 2560x2560 bounding box upon uploading
Famly saves a draft and stores it in the icon in the upper right corner of the post box, in case you get interrupted when writing a post. When you have time, go back and find the draft, finish your post and send it by pressing the Send button.
Polls on the Newsfeed
Read here about creating and sending a poll to families or staff, directly from Famly.
Send Activities on the Newsfeed
Read here about sending Activities from your Activity Library to families, directly from the Newsfeed.
Bookmarking a post on the Newsfeed
It is possible to bookmark certain posts if you would like them to be easily accessible. This might be your favorite posts, or ones which you wish to view frequently.
You could, for example, request parents bookmark a post about a certain policy, to refer back to later.
To bookmark a post:
Tap on the ... in the top right-hand corner of the post
Select Bookmark from the menu
This post will now be bookmarked
Note that you can only bookmark items that appear in the My News version of your feed (see below). Newsfeed items exclusively on the center's feed cannot be bookmarked.
Bookmarks are all stored in the same place, at the top of your Newsfeed. Head to My News and select Bookmarks from the drop-down menu
Disable likes and comments
You can choose if you want to disable parents commenting on or liking your post. You do this by tapping on the ... next to the send button. These don't appear until you've written something in the text field.
Staff Permissions
If you wish to share certain posts with only a specific group, make sure your staff do not have the View all news feed posts permission enabled as part of their role. To check this:
Head to Menu → Settings (or go straight to settings from your sidebar if you're using a desktop computer)
Go to Staff → Roles and permissions
Go to the Communication and Events section
Make sure View all news feed posts is not checked
How names are shown on the Newsfeed
As an added layer of privacy, you can control how names are shown in the Newsfeed. To do so:
Head to your Settings
Select Communication, then Newsfeed
Find Privacy Setting
Here, you can choose how names should show on the newsfeed:
The full name of the parent/carer and the first name of the child
The first name of the parent/carer and the first name of the child
The first name of the parent/carer and no child information
Additionally, you can choose whether the child’s room is shown or not
Click Save changes
