Demos blur together. You leave each one with an impression and no notes, and by the time you compare them you are choosing between presenters. Score each criterion during the call itself, before the demo ends.
1. Who is allowed into the room
What to ask: who can enter the room, and what can the teacher do about a participant causing trouble in the middle of a lesson? Count the clicks for each answer.
- Approval at the door: can the teacher see who is asking to join and decide one by one?
- Device controls: muting, camera, and switching between two microphones without leaving the lesson
- Screen sharing a teacher can start and stop mid-lesson
- A participant view that holds a full class on one screen
Ask as well what happens to a participant the teacher removes: whether they can walk straight back in, and whether the teacher has to keep half an eye on the door for the rest of the lesson.
A solid answer: approval at the door is standard behaviour and not an option someone has to remember to switch on. With younger students, put that line in your required column before the demo starts. A platform where anyone holding the address lands inside a live lesson is a different kind of product from the one you are shopping for. Ask as well how a person comes to have an account at all. In RoomHex the answer is short: the institution creates every account itself, after a review.
2. Breakout rooms, run live in front of you
What to ask: run the whole sequence live, in a room holding enough people to form more than one group. Forming groups is the easy part; the awkward parts come later.
A solid answer: the presenter does all four while you watch, without narrating what would happen in a real class. Time the setup yourself as it happens, because a breakout that is slow to open will not get used in a lesson with material to cover.
3. What a student can do besides watch
What to ask: what can a student do besides watch, and what does the teacher see while they do it? Work through the list below one item at a time and ask for each to be shown from the teacher's screen.
A solid answer: all of it happens inside one lesson, on one screen, with no second tool opened. If the presenter switches to another product to run a poll, that is another product your teachers have to learn and your school has to approve.
4. What the lesson leaves behind
What to ask: how does an attendance entry get created, does the teacher have to do anything for it, and what else exists once the session ends? Then ask the presenter to end the demo session and show you the finished record in the same call.
A solid answer: the platform writes the record while students arrive and the teacher never pauses the lesson to call names, the recording is available to a student who missed the class without an administrator handling each request, and any written output passes a human check before it reaches students. Ask who that reader is by job title, and how long they have to do it. A weak answer points at the live participant list and suggests you count.
The storage location is the part to pin down by name, and for a graded or funded program, agree who keeps the record when a contract ends. RoomHex is self-hosted, so the name is the institution's own infrastructure at its own domain, and attendance records, recordings and anything written from a session stay there.
- classroom
- teaching
- breakout-rooms
Score any demo against an hour actually spent in RoomHex Classroom.