Primary Planning Tool

Software Development

Our client, Heremon Education Software, identified an opportunity to develop a product to support lesson planning and progression reporting for teachers. Radii was engaged to deliver the software development, web design and smartphone app development required to research, design, build and launch a product that would meet the market requirement which had been identified.

Primary Planning Tool - Web Design by Radii.ie

Background

Every teacher is required to create teaching plans and progress reports throughout the year. This creates a significant administration burden for the teacher and the Principal, who receives up to 12 separate reports (one per subject) from each teacher in the school each month.

Planning

Launching a new product into the Primary School market carries significant challenges, and there are many obstacles to overcome. Technology available in schools varies greatly in type, availability, age, and condition. In addition, while some teachers are very tech savvy and confident trying new technology, many are very hesitant to do things differently. This presented an additional challenge from a user experience design (UX) and software development point of view; the end result must be easy to use, intuitive, and appeal to a wide demographic.

Primary Planning Tool Preview - Software Development by Radii.ie

To begin, we organised a series of UX design workshops. These were attended by teachers, school principals, and members of the Radii design and software development team. The objective was to fully understand the end user and who we were designing for as well where a potential solution could add value. Online surveys proved to be a vital source of data which played an important role in the design decisions made throughout the software development process.

Engaging with a wide variety of teachers allowed us to gather and study artefacts including teaching plans and curriculum documentation. User interviews and co-creation research techniques allowed us to further explore concepts with real world users to test a variety of approaches.

The information gathered during this phase was crucial to the design decisions made and gave us the opportunity to continually validate and test various concepts throughout the software development process.

The Solution

The Primary Planning Tool is a cloud based curriculum aligned planning tool which allows teachers to create, integrate and manage all aspects of their planning requirements in one location. Long Term Plans, Short Term Plans and Cuntais Míosúla are available from any desktop or mobile device, as well as a companion smartphone App. Thematic plans, collaboration and multi-grade teaching, and Whole School Planning is also supported by the product making it the most comprehensive school planning application available.