1. Security! We take security extremely seriously, especially when it comes to student data. We are also careful to ensure students are never exposed to advertisements or anything inappropriate and to protect the rights of creators who sell in our store.
2. Actionable data. Boom Cards are self-grading to give students immediate feedback, and our Reports enable educators to track progress and performance, recognize any learning loss or gaps, and then act on that information immediately by creating customized curriculum or modifying ready-made decks. Reports make it easy to spot when students have mastered a subject or are just guessing their way through it, and the Live Monitoring empowers educators even in distance learning situations. Having that data automatically generated, and the ability to look in-depth at how students are answering to see where they are struggling or mastering material, makes a huge difference. The ability to recognize where students are at and assign customized curriculum is a game changer.
3. School Organizational Accounts. Schools and Organizations can buy memberships and points for whole teams and manage everything, even renewals, from one dashboard. We also make the process easy; they can pay for everything with a Card or Purchase Order, our team will work with them to set up the account and answer questions, and we are on top of any security concerns or questions schools might have.

The BOOM Learning platform captures and reports on data about each student, their progress, where they are doing well or struggling. etc.

Thrilling and a little overwhelming at times, but mostly incredibly humbling. The outpouring of love we see from educators every day is amazing and a great reminder of why we do what we do.

The number of new customers that have joined us since last Spring has been unbelievable and struggling to respond to every request was a humbling experience all on its own.

The more we work with our customers though, the more clearly we understand that we are providing more than just a fun and engaging way to educate students; we’re here to help educators stay sane and feel empowered and effective every single day. It’s amazing to be able to support our educators, because we have so much respect for everything they do.

Students can track their own progress and see which decks they have completed

We’re still a relatively small company, but we have more than 10 times the staff we did last Spring. Boom went from having just a couple of people responding to every help request that was sent in to needing about a dozen hands on deck.

We kept hiring and training new people, and the requests just kept coming. It took us until the end of 2020 to catch up, and the dust still hasn’t completely settled.

If you’ve seen our New Year’s blog post (https://blog.boomlearning.com/new-year-new-team/) you may have noticed that most of the team joined over the course of last Fall, and they came in when we were completely flooded with requests from new and existing customers.

More recently, we’ve been hiring more help for the backroom jobs (such as legal, finance, and development), but we’re especially focused on growing our small development team. We’re lucky to have such an amazing community, because we’re constantly receiving feedback and hearing amazing ideas from folks; as we add more Code Poets (as we call them) to our team, we’re able to turn those ideas into real tools and features. It’s really exciting to see what’s started coming out of the digital workshop.

It’s been challenging but also an amazing opportunity. Educators came to us, because they had heard from colleagues that we offered the digital tools they needed to make virtual or hybrid learning manageable. We had to scramble to keep up with the demand last Spring, and by Summer we were woefully behind in getting back to everyone who had sent in requests.

As we got things back under control, we finally came up for air, and it was then that we fully appreciated just how much of an impact we were making. We have been able to support so many educators through a truly difficult and testing time.

We walked beside educators who were technologically challenged as well as those who were emotionally drained and even physically impacted by the pandemic. It is difficult to put that into words, except to say we are humbled and honored to be there.

Now we’re finally able to look forward to what might be: new tools for the in-person classroom, new hybrid learning options (for snow days), and better ways for students to practice and master skills in a more engaging way. Education and technology have been forced together in new ways, and we are excited to play our part on this new stage.

The BOOM Learning studio interface for building education resource decks

We seemed to be doing nothing but hiring and training new team members alright, and everyone has taken to wearing multiple hats.

Early on, we had a customer service agent develop an onboarding program from scratch for new customer service agents, and since then every member of the team has adopted at least one other role in addition to helping customers.

Each one of us juggles the phone calls and emailed requests for help every day right along-side backroom chores or outreach programs such as our new Webinars Series (designed to help schools get all their teachers set up) and our very first Live Event (which crowned a week of giveaways in honor of Teacher Appreciation Week).

BOOM Learning education resource preview

Starting last summer, we’ve offered a public “wishlist” where people have been adding ideas and requests steadily, and we are finally able to start working through that list.  Our Dev team has got a lot in the pipeline; I can’t get into the details just yet, but I can say we will be adding features, improving functionality, and generally smoothing out the rough edges, so that Boom Learning becomes more intuitive as well as more impactful.

We will continue to reach out more and more to our community moving forward, because frankly that’s where our best ideas come from, and because we genuinely enjoy their company – you can find a more creative, compassionate, and delightful group.

We’re also aware that Learning Loss is a big worry right now. While educators can already count on our Reports for help identifying gaps, we want to make it even easier to create or find curriculum that fits each student’s needs, so you can look forward to improvements and new features from the deck editor tools to the store and even some changes to the look and layout of the website.

We also want to show educators how to make the most of Boom, so from now through the start of the new school year, keep an eye out Webinars and other tips and tutorials as well as improvements to our Help Center and FAQs.

Finally, we are coordinating with other platforms to find ways Boom can integrate and compliment other tools educators are using. We have had Google Classroom Integration for a while and recently added Clever, but we don’t want to stop there. Hybrid learning is likely here to stay, and our job is to make it easier on educators (who already have enough on their plates without technology-induced headaches).