Yes, your school can test Vivi in live lessons before spending a penny. The Vivi pilot programme is a free, time-limited trial that puts wireless screen mirroring, digital signage, announcements and emergency alerts into your own classrooms, running alongside whatever you already use. DMS scopes the pilot, checks your network is ready, installs the units, briefs your teaching staff and supports the trial from start to finish.

You choose the classrooms, the year groups and the length of the evaluation. At the end you have real usage data and genuine teacher feedback from your own site, not a vendor demo in a hotel conference room. That evidence is what governors, trust boards and finance leads want to see before they release capital funding.

Who This Is For

This is written for the people who carry the risk when classroom technology fails. That means school and trust IT Managers and Network Managers who inherit whatever gets bought, School Business Managers balancing capital bids against a tight revenue position, and Senior Leaders and Heads of Digital who are answerable for teaching and learning outcomes.

You might be running a single primary with fifteen classrooms, a large secondary with three hundred display points, or a multi-academy trust standardising across sites. The common thread is an autumn term review, ageing interactive panels or unreliable cables, and a spring budget conversation coming fast.

The Problem With Buying Classroom AV From a Datasheet and a Demo

Most schools have a cupboard full of technology that nobody uses. Visualisers, dongles, adapters, a wireless casting box that only ever worked with one laptop. It was bought on the strength of a polished demonstration, deployed in the summer holidays, and quietly abandoned by half term because it did not fit how teachers actually teach.

IT teams then spend the year fielding tickets about it. Business Managers get asked why the spend did not deliver, and Senior Leaders lose credibility with staff who are already sceptical of the next new thing. The risk is not really the money. It is the change fatigue that follows a failed rollout.

See it working in your own classrooms before you commit anything.

Request your free Vivi pilot with DMS

What the Vivi Pilot Programme Actually Includes

The Vivi pilot programme is designed to remove the guesswork, not to accelerate a sale. Vivi is a classroom platform that lets teachers share their screen wirelessly from anywhere in the room, hand control to pupils, push digital signage to displays and trigger site-wide emergency alerts from a phone.

In a pilot you get all of that in a small number of real classrooms, running in parallel with your current solution so staff can compare the two directly. You keep the evidence either way.

DMS works with Vivi to handle the practical side as your local partner. Starting with a network readiness assessment (/network-assessment), because in experience with large majority of classroom casting failures turn out to be network problems rather than product problems, and they are almost always visible before a single unit goes in. Then install the units, configure the management console, brief teachers in a short session that respects their time, and stay reachable throughout the trial.

Beyond Mirroring: School Digital Signage, Announcements and Emergency Alerts

A Vivi trial for schools is worth running even if wireless screen mirroring is not your headline priority. Every display running Vivi doubles as a signage screen, so a reception panel, a corridor display and a classroom projector can all show timetable changes, assembly reminders, attendance campaigns or celebration content from one console. Announcements can be scheduled or sent instantly to selected zones.

Emergency alerts are the capability that tends to change the conversation with Senior Leaders. A lockdown, fire or medical alert can be triggered from a staff phone and appear on every screen in the building within seconds, with instructions attached.

This matters for the business case as much as for safeguarding. A supervised drill during the pilot gives you a tested, documented capability to put in front of your safeguarding lead and governors, which is a far stronger piece of evidence than a feature list.

Step by Step: Running a Vivi Pilot in the Autumn Term

1. Define what success looks like before anything is installed. Agree three or four measures with your Senior Leadership Team, for example lesson start time saved, number of pupil-led screen shares, tickets raised, or teacher confidence scored before and after.
2. Choose a representative sample of classrooms, not your best ones. Include a sceptic, a heavy technology user, a room with known wireless weak spots and a subject area that uses visual content constantly, such as art, science or PE theory.
3. Book the DMS network readiness assessment. We check wireless coverage and bandwidth headroom, then look at switch and VLAN configuration (how your network is segmented) and multicast behaviour (how it handles one-to-many traffic such as screen casting). Anything that needs attention gets flagged before the pilot begins rather than halfway through.
4. Install and brief in one visit. Units go in, the console is configured against your Microsoft or Google tenancy, and teachers get a short hands-on session covering the three things they will use daily.
5. Run for a full half term at minimum. Anything shorter measures novelty rather than habit, and you need the trial to survive a wet week, a cover teacher and a parents evening.
6. Review with usage data and staff feedback together. Present both to your finance lead ahead of spring budget setting and the 2027/28 capital planning cycle.

What to Watch Out For

• Running the pilot only in your newest, best-connected classrooms. It produces flattering results that collapse at full rollout in the older block.
• Skipping the teacher briefing to save half an hour. Adoption drops sharply when staff discover features by accident rather than being shown them.
• Treating the trial as an IT project with no teaching and learning voice. Curriculum leads need to own the outcome measures, or the business case reads as a technology purchase.
• Ignoring your wireless refresh cycle. If access points are already saturated at 9am, fix that first or the evaluation is testing your network, not Vivi.
• Leaving the emergency alert function untested because a drill feels like a hassle.

Quick Checklist

• Confirm who signs off the eventual purchase and what evidence they need to see.
• Pick six to ten classrooms across different buildings, key stages and subject areas.
• List your current classroom kit, including panel models, projector ages and casting devices in use.
• Book a network readiness assessment before the pilot start date, not after.
• Identify one teacher champion per participating area and give them ten minutes at a staff briefing.
• Schedule a supervised emergency alert test with your safeguarding lead.
• Diarise the review meeting now, before the spring budget papers are drafted.
• Check whether trust capital funding or the Connect the Classroom programme could cover the rollout. Connect the Classroom carries £325m of government investment running from 2025 to 2030, and schools that have already been upgraded still need the classroom-facing technology that sits on top of the new network.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the Vivi pilot programme really free, or is there a hidden cost?

The pilot itself carries no licence or hardware cost for the classrooms included in the trial. DMS covers the scoping, installation and support as part of the programme. The only realistic cost to your school is staff time for the briefing and the review, plus any network remediation you decide to carry out, which would have been needed anyway.

How long does a school trial of Vivi need to run?

Half a term is the practical minimum and a full term is better. Shorter trials measure curiosity rather than embedded habit. They also miss the ordinary disruptions such as cover staff, room changes and busy assessment weeks that reveal whether a tool genuinely holds up in daily use.

Will Vivi work alongside our existing interactive panels and projectors?

Yes. Vivi connects to displays you already own via HDMI, which is precisely why the pilot can run in parallel with your current setup. Teachers can switch between the two during the trial and tell you honestly which they prefer. That is far more persuasive to a budget holder than a vendor comparison chart.

What happens to our data and devices at the end of the pilot?

If you decide not to proceed, DMS removes the units and the trial ends with no obligation. If you do proceed, the pilot classrooms continue running and the configuration already built during the trial carries into the wider deployment, which shortens the eventual rollout considerably.

The Budget Window Is Open Now

You are at the point in the autumn term where the classroom technology problem is well understood and the budget conversation is still open. That window closes quickly. Once spring papers are drafted and capital lines are allocated, the honest answer becomes wait until next year, and another cohort teaches through another year of trailing cables and unreliable connections.

A pilot costs you a briefing session and a review meeting. It gives you usage data, teacher testimony and a tested emergency alert capability to put in front of the people who sign off spend.

Book your no-obligation Vivi trial with the DMS education team 

Not ready to trial yet? Arrange a short consultation and we will talk you through what a pilot would look like on your site.