Welcome, Betatester!

Welcome to Plan4Preschool.org, beta-tester~

First of all, Thank You!

We appreciate that you are taking the time to help us launch this portal for the ECE community.

Following the steps below will give you a quick overview of Plan4Preschool and its capacity to enhance your work.  You can be a valuable Betatester by completing the feedback form linked at the bottom of the page.

To get started, print this page, grab a paper to jot some notes, and follow along below.  We’ll guide you the rest of the way.

Your thoughts as you go through this process, where you get stuck, and things that don’t make sense, are all very valuable feedback for us.

1. Registering

Register

Registering should only take you a minute. Jot down anything that you find confusing as you go along. Register here »

2. Searching

Plan4Preschool.org has a customized search engine which allows you to search the whole web but returns only "Preschool" related results. It's powered by Google and tailored by us. You'll be able to recognize it by it's watermark:

Google Watermark

What have you had trouble finding recently? Go ahead and give it a try! Also, what should you definitely be able to find? Jot down whether you found what you wanted, and any sites we should include in our search:

3. Contributing

The real power of Plan4Preschool.org is that is is designed from the ground up to be community-driven. This means that it is the whole preschool planning community, and not any single organization, that decides what resources and events should be featured on the site.

Once you are registered, adding a resource document or an event is as easy as filling out a form and clicking the Submit button. At that point, in order to maintain the quality of the resources and the calendar, a community moderator will look over your submission and approve it if appropriate.

Let's give submitting a try. Pick a document or an event that would be valuable to the community, and follow the instructions below:

Submit a Document Submit an Event
  1. Go to the Submit a Document page.
  2. Required: Add a title, abstract, select appropriate categories, and browse for and select the file.
  3. Optional: Add the document authors, date published, sponsoring organization, link, etc.
  4. Click Submit, and you're done.

Note: The categories determine what section a document displays under, and selecting a related county will make the document display in that county's showcase.
  1. Go to the Submit an Event page.
  2. Required: Add a title, select a date and time, and add the location.
  3. Optional: Add an end date & time, an event description, an associated county, contact info, etc.
  4. Click Submit, and you're done.

Note: Every event has a time associated with it, even if it's an all-day thing. If you want an event to display in a county-specific calendar, select the Associated County.

4. Browsing

Ok, now for the fun part. Take as long or as short a time as you want, and look around the site. Please jot down things that look weird or confuse you, anything that seems to be broken, and anything that you liked. You can always click on the logo in the upper left-hand corner to get back to the homepage. Start on the homepage »

While you browse and discover the site on your own, here are some things you can do:

5. Feedback

How'd you like it? What would you change? Would you use it? There are lots of ways to get us your feedback:

6. Use it!

We know you'll see the benefit of using Plan4Preschool to find the information, documents, and contacts that you're looking for. As you use the site, questions, comments, (and bugs!) are likely to come up, and we trust that you'll tell us about them, especially during this beta-test period. Once again, thanks for your help!

You can send us questions and other comments at