Add new life to the screens in your school

In this article, Nigel Milligan shines a spotlight on an often-overlooked resource that can be used to promote all that is good about your school. It’s time to talk about screen time…

How often do you see screens in waiting rooms, entrance areas or in public areas that are switched off? Maybe this is something that many of you have not even thought about!

Historically in schools, there was a particular company who introduced screens and content that – at the time – was classed as a game changer! It enabled schools to share great video content they had created, so visitors could see the fantastic things that the pupils were doing in school.

The company still exists today, alongside many others who have joined the digital signage marketplace. Digital signage is commonplace in shopping malls, supermarkets, airports and railway stations to name a few. There are endless opportunities to create inspiring content and enable fast information updates to be shared to any screen in real-time.

When we first started to use this system in the schools I was involved with, the reaction from pupils, parents and visitors was fantastic. I helped to create video slideshows and edited movies of activities with the addition of background music (to add a whole new dimension!). Sadly, many of the schools who had the original system installed couldn’t afford to keep this up to date and are left with screens that are gathering dust, waiting for a new lease of life.

New lease of life

If you are in one of these schools, why not consider looking at some of the options available to you that offer different benefits ranging from a simple digital signage solution right through to a collaborative option that engages the pupils to create the content?

Before I go through a few of the possible providers, I’d like to go through some of the possible challenges you may face – along with some of the barriers you may come up against.

Be mindful of where the screens are placed, the main issue with entrance area screens is the audio. The office staff very often just switched the screen off due to the soundtrack becoming monotonous and distracting from their work. Where the screen is located should determine the content that is displayed.

Leverage IT support

The screens you had installed over 10 years ago may not have HDMI inputs, so they possibly won’t be full HD either. This will mean the quality of the display may not be suitable for connecting the most recent devices for streaming the content.

There are various HDMI to VGA adapters available to help with this. The best thing to do is to discuss this fully with your IT support provider. We have in many cases been able to connect devices such as Apple TV’s, Mini NUC PC’s or ChromeBoxes with great success. There should be a network connection available with the original screen, this would have been an extender unit to send the video signal from a host PC, but the cable can be used to patch into a network data point that the new player unit can be connected to. Again, your IT provider should be able to assist with this.

Breaking barriers

You may ask, which barriers will we come up against? A common response is ‘we don’t need this any longer due to the fact we publish all this content on our social media channels and / or school website’. Yes, whilst this is effective in some ways, there are a lot of benefits to having content and information being shared to your screens.

There are a selection of providers who assist with elevating your school’s screens as well as many options available for the type of media player device that can be added depending on the solution that you decide to go with. Why not look at all areas around school where the addition of a screen would make an amazing difference? As ever if you’d like to discuss anything further, please feel free to reach out and I can assist with finding the right solutions and providers for you.