Your Guide to a Successful Busy Things’ Trial
Have you ever taken out a free trial of a resource never to get beyond the welcome email? Or maybe you tried one activity but got sidetracked by other priorities? It happens to the best of us but, by adding a little structure to the process, we can put ourselves in the driving seat and make sure we get what we need from the trial.
In 2022, the Government undertook some research that looked at the implementation of education technology in schools and its paper offers great insights into best practice. Within it, it discusses trials and how useful they are for providing schools with the time and space to explore different platforms, their potential impact and challenges.
Here at Busy Things, we offer a 28-day free trial to give teachers the opportunity to explore our activities, curriculum coverage and tools. Any number of teaching staff can take part in the trial using the Teacher login we provide, and we advocate trying the activities with pupils too, as they are ultimately the end users!
How to organise a successful trial
A successful trial is not always one that leads to a subscription, although we obviously like it when that happens. It’s a trial where you’ve had the opportunity to properly evaluate the resource. To achieve this, a bit of planning goes a long way, and there are three distinct phases:
1. Planning your Busy Things’ trial
Before jumping in, it’s important that you:
1.1 Define your objectives
A key part of a successful trial is understanding the objectives behind it. Schools can use Busy Things in a range of different ways. You could be looking at it as a teaching and learning resource for classroom use, a reinforcement tool for homework or to support independent learning for example. Alternatively, you may be exploring it as resource specifically for your SEND children to increase their access to learning opportunities or improve their engagement. Your objectives will shape what you want to look at and who to involve.
Writing a list of questions you need answers to is also good practice and will undoubtedly keep you focused during the trial.
1.2 Decide who will be involved
When trialing a new resource, it’s beneficial to get a different number of perspectives. Implementation of a new resource can be very different if viewed strategically, from a purely technical viewpoint and from the user perspective, so asking your ICT Coordinator and Key Stage Coordinators to get involved along with teaching colleagues is often useful.
They will all have different priorities and potentially bring different questions to the table. That’s good though as that is what the trial is all about – finding out more!
1.3 Choosing the right time
Timing is everything. It’s difficult to dedicate time to something new if you’ve got deadlines approaching, so choose a time when there are as few competing priorities as possible to take a trial. Scheduling short progress check-ins with colleagues also participating in the trial will help keep the trial on track and ensure it doesn’t get sidelined.
2. The trial period itself
The trial period itself is your time to dive into Busy Things, explore and get your questions answered.
We’d recommend you sign up to all our emails when you set up the trial as we’ve devised them to guide you through the features we think you’ll find most interesting.
Be sure to sign up for a Zoom call too! Rachel has a wealth of knowledge about the platform and experience from working with all types of schools. She’ll be able to help you embed Busy Things into your provision and make the absolute most of it.
Dig out your initial list of questions for her too because she’ll undoubtedly be able to offer some advice.
3. Your evaluation of Busy Things
By the end of your 28-day trial, you should have a good idea of what Busy Things offers as individual teachers but also as a group. Meeting together to discuss the positives, negatives and challenges is time well spent to ascertain if it meets all your needs.
If it does or doesn’t, we’d love to hear your feedback so we can build on what we have.
If you love what you see, now’s the time to develop your case for your Senior Leadership Team. To help with this, we’ve developed crib sheets which include benefits, features and testimonials for mainstream schools and SEND settings. You can cut and paste from these to create a custom-made document specific to your school.
We don’t need to tell you that budgets can be limiting so it may be worth presenting figures for a phased roll-out, i.e., just one key stage initially, or perhaps suggesting that you drop another resource at renewal to free up budget.
Don’t feel you’ve had enough time to decide either way at this stage? As mentioned earlier, we know not all trials go to plan so are flexible. If you need more time, it’s not a problem. Just get in touch and we can extend your access for you.
Summary
Taking out a trial of a new resource like Busy Things takes just a couple of clicks but getting the most out of one usually requires an element of planning. By focusing on your goals, involving the right people, and making time for discussion and evaluation, you’ll have everything you need to make an informed decision.
We hope you found this blog useful and would love you and your colleagues to trial Busy Things. To do this, simply click here and remember to both sign up for the emails at registration and a Zoom call!