S07.E26: FashionTap, brellaBox, My Fruity Faces, Brightwheel

[hatchetgirl]

That fashion blogger's glasses were so fake, I wanted to punch her.  I'm surrounded by hipsters and I'll say "ugh another hipster. " only to have my 8 yr say "but mom, they are just people. "  ARGH, schooled by an 8 yr old.  

 

Umbrellas.  Sigh.  I have a coat with a hood because I can't be bothered with another thing in my hands.  I know sounds lake, but I like to keep my hands warm in my pockets.  I've always hated umbrellas.  Even when I lived in Scotland, you would never see me with one.  Give me a parka with a nice hood and I'm golden.

Edited to add... 

Someone shoot me...  

Edited May 14, 2016 by hatchetgirl
Additional content

[Amarsir]

In a modest defense of the sticker guys, there was a fairly well-publicized study about this. 

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cartoon-stickers-may-sway-kids-food-c-idUSBRE87K11S20120821

Quote

When the snacks weren't specially marked, 91 percent of kids took a cookie and just under one-quarter took an apple.

Putting an Elmo sticker on the apples led 37 percent of kids to take fruit, the researchers reported this week in a letter to the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

Now that doesn't defend their business. It's pretty clear to me they were just trying to capitalize on the study without any real advantages to play. But the idea that cartoon stickers motivate food choices does have some basis.

[designing1]

I wonder how many of them ate the fruit and how many just wanted to collect the sticker.

[NoPantsMcGee]

Good to know that I'm everything wrong in America! My daughter's small, in home daycare uses brightwheel and I love it. The woman in charge basically takes a few unobtrusive cell phone pics throughout the day while the kids are playing outside or in circle time, marks nap time start and stop, tells us when we need to send more diapers and we pay through it. Going from a one on one babysitter to this daycare setting, it was just reassuring to see that my kid was having fun with the other kids. I can't imagine it working in a bigger setting (there are usually about 8 kids in this daycare) without the concerns voiced by others here, though.

(No, I don't work for brightwheel)

[NoPantsMcGee]

  On 5/1/2016 at 2:50 PM, Missy Vixen said:

This is exactly what will happen and worse: "How come Susie's daughter got more updates today than mine did? Does the teacher like Susie's daughter more than she likes mine?

My oldest in elementary school has Class Dojo and while the teacher doesn't use it for points, she does take a lot of photos. At first, it was nice to see, but I did find myself sort of creeping back into middle school mode like "Hey, why aren't you taking more pictures of my kid? Why isn't my kid in that big group photo you just took?"

And then when I asked my kid about it, he said the photos actually make him uncomfortable -- because there will be big groups he can't get into for a photo, and then he feels upset and left out. He also got this weird look on his face when I mentioned seeing the photos and what he was studying, like he had no idea he was being "watched" like that. It was at that point I stopped looking at the photos. My mother put three kids through college, all without once seeing a single real-time update of our days.

I finally realized what this app -- and Brightwheel -- reminded me of: My sister-in-law's doggie daycare kept a camera with a live feed of the dog pen, so she could check in on her dog and make sure he was OK. That's essentially what these apps are. So, good luck to Mark and "Uber! Uber! Uber!" Chris on their new purchase: doggie daycare cameras for parents.

As a brightwheel user, the doggie daycare camera for parents comment is not inaccurate.

[NikSac]

6 hours ago, NoPantsMcGee said:

Good to know that I'm everything wrong in America! My daughter's small, in home daycare uses brightwheel and I love it. The woman in charge basically takes a few unobtrusive cell phone pics throughout the day while the kids are playing outside or in circle time, marks nap time start and stop, tells us when we need to send more diapers and we pay through it. Going from a one on one babysitter to this daycare setting, it was just reassuring to see that my kid was having fun with the other kids. I can't imagine it working in a bigger setting (there are usually about 8 kids in this daycare) without the concerns voiced by others here, though.

(No, I don't work for brightwheel)

Thanks for sharing your experience with it!  I can actually see it making way more sense in a small daycare setting like what you're describing.

[HawaiiTVGuy]

My impression of the app was that it had a lot of functionality, but it was easily changed to whatever functions any user wanted.  As mentioned upthread, this was designed to streamline stuff that care-providers are already doing so it wasn't a matter of adding any "helicopter-parenting" aspects or "adding" any additional work to the child-care providers, but to help digitize and streamline it, with the touch of photos.  My son's preschool already takes the occasional photos that we sometimes get via texts, or at the end of the year on a flash drive.  I would think that if there was a way for his teacher to seamlessly transmit the photos all the time, that would be welcome.

[LeGrandElephant]

I didn't think the umbrella idea was THAT bad - they've definitely had far worse ideas on this show. But the big problem is that you would need a lot of boxes for it to work, and each of their boxes seemed too expensive to be able to do that. I could see it working on a college campus but there would have to be an umbrella box outside of every single building on campus in order for this to work for students and faculty to rely on it and not carry around their own rain gear.  So they would need the installation of each box to be a lot cheaper for this to be really feasible. It would probably be cheaper for the college to just buy thousands of cheapo umbrellas and leave them in unsecured bins, tell students to use the honor system to return them, and just write off the ones that get stolen a loss. 

I think the Brightwheel idea sounds fine for small daycares, but I hope they have some kind of privacy rules to protect your kid's images and info. 

Stickers seemed stupid. I doubt it would make the kids eat something they didn't want to eat - at most it would have novelty value for a couple days. Also, fruit is already the sweetest and most appealing of the healthy kids foods... 

[Kiss my mutt]

Would kids generalize eating this food stickers to eating other stickers? It might give some kids the impression that stickers are edible. Maybe they can start eating the UPC code stickers or Chiquita banana stickers.  

If someone could make a light weight pen size umbrella that would expand in 10 seconds and easily collapse I'd get that but I doubt I would use an umbrella rental service more than once and then realize how stupid it was and never do it again.