With the significant uptake in smart phones, tablet computers, WiFi and other technologies designed to facilitate communication it's easier than ever to keep the parents of the kids in your centre informed about what's going on.

Technology can be used by child care services to communicate with parents throughout the day, to disseminate newsletters and paperwork, to display artworks and to share daily reports. Some providers take photos and videos which are shared via social media sites, others use text messages and blogging and e-newsletters are becoming a popular way of staying in touch with parents.

The key is to ensure any technology you use does not detract from time spent caring for the kids and to view it as a complement to traditional face-to-face communication which is undeniably one of the most important aspects of maintaining great relationships between child care providers and families.

Corrimal Community Preschool in NSW have been using a child care communication application called Kinderloop to send secure real time updates to parents in the form of photos, videos and news for the last seven weeks.

Director of the preschool Kobie Connor said using the application has dramatically improved communication between the centre and parents and she said they have had a 100 per cent parent take up of the technology with 186 parents and 744 extended family members using the application on a daily basis.

"Kinderloop is going full steam ahead at our centre. The families love seeing the photos of their children each day. It is also helping to 'settle' the new mums and dads into the centre. It's saving us so much time reporting," said Ms Connor.

Ms Connor said using the technology also delivered costs savings by reducing 'off the floor' time by 4-5 hours per week and $134.61 in savings on consumables over the seven week period.

Time and money saving technology applications like this are a great way of strengthening the lines of communication between child care services and families. The key is to adopt user friendly apps which are simple and effective and which don't add to your workload or take too much time to operate.