School Lobby Communication System
Customer: Balcarres Community School
Balcarres, Saskatchewan
Goal: Increase student moral and improve awareness of school activities
Situation
Balcarres Community School, located in the rural community of Balcarres, Saskatchewan, is situated 500km west of Winnipeg and houses 465 k-12 students. The school was interested in improving the awareness of school activities and building moral by highlighting the students’ sports and academic achievements and class projects. School officials identified that a digital signage solution could fulfill the need of communicating multiple messages, but they struggled with how to maintain the large amount of content changes required on a frequent basis.
Solution
Nagels AV Services–Saskatchewan, with offices throughout Canada, was tasked by Balcarres Community School to identify a digital signage content management application to meet their demanding content needs. Being a RidgeLogic Select Reseller Partner, AV Services didn’t have to look far for a solution because they knew SceneStudio was a perfect fit. The intuitive user interface allows non-technical users to learn the application quickly, and a convenient online tutorial serves as a refresher for users that don’t interact with it on a daily basis. Although, it was the ability of SceneStudio to allow text messages to be updated from a Microsoft Word document that was the clincher. This capability meant the staff could work with ordinary office tools they were already familiar with, so keeping the content fresh became achievable.
To operate the SceneStudio application Nagels AV Services installed an approved dual purpose media player/server in the schools IT closet and used a Kramer distribution amp to send the VGA signal to two 42” Toshiba HL-series displays located in areas frequented by the students. SceneStudio Editor was installed on a client PC on the local network, and one dedicated user updates multimedia scenes, playlists and playback schedules and inserts Microsoft Word content supplied by various staff members.
Benefits
School officials are very pleased with the interest students have given the content on the LCD displays and believe they take pride seeing their class projects and achievements featured. This attention is also building awareness of school activities because the activity listings are played back in between the student achievements.