Bright Spots Winners: July 2024

Nicole Poucher & Sharon Cloutier

System Administrators, TVCCA Little Learners Early Education Program

Sesame Street makes learning fun and entertaining for small children. A lot of adults can still remember songs and lessons from the show. Wouldn’t it be great if the fun continued through high school, college and even into adulthood?  Our Bright Spots winners for July thought so! They used games and other techniques to roll out ChildPlus 6.6 (the latest and greatest version of ChildPlus). Their approach made it so much easier for staff to adopt and welcome the new improvements to their database.   

Meet Nicole Poucher and Sharon Cloutier, system administrators for TVCCA Little Learners Early Education Program.  Their agency has over 20 classrooms – all of which were soon to be impacted by the latest update to their database earlier this summer.  The duo knew that staff would need training and support to help them navigate the new and improved Attendance module. So, they developed a series of fun and engaging training activities to prepare staff for the pending update. 

Instead of hosting traditional training, they decided to jazz things up by creating fun fictional families to practice with in the Preview Database. They also circulated helpful links to Learning Library videos and wrapped it all up with a game of Jeopardy. Winning teams earned trophies and the title of “Attendance Gurus” – because who doesn’t love bragging rights? 

To go a step further in ensuring staff felt supported and prepared along the way, Nicole and Sharon also assigned a point person at each location to lean on. Once the new update arrived, they visited each site to address questions and concerns about how to navigate the new changes to their databases.   

ChildPlus offers many tools to support in-house learning. We’re glad that Nicole and Sharon used them in combination with their own tools to create a fun and engaging learning environment.