Around the UK, schools are replacing printed notices with digital screens that look more attractive, can be updated simultaneously across a whole campus at the click of a mouse, and allow them to communicate with pupils, teaching and non-teaching staff, parents and other stakeholders with multimedia content such as video and audio.
“Digital communications are the norm for today’s student,” says Eyal Rom, executive vice-president of sales and marketing at DGScreen, an Israeli supplier of digital media equipment for schools. “Between their mobile phones, laptops and tablets, this generation’s youth are more comfortable with instant, electronic messaging than any other form of communication. It just makes sense that their school should use this technology to communicate with them too.” Plus, he might add, pupils can be involved in preparing content for the screens, learning skills that they can apply in fields from design to IT to business.
While a specialist outside firm is often brought in to design and deploy a school’s screen network, typically the task of running it day to day will fall to existing staff, so it’s essential to understand the key elements.
First, there are the screens themselves – usually professional-grade LCD units, although plasma displays are also sometimes used. Around 40 inches is a common size but the optimum dimensions depend on the position of the screens, the distance they’ll be viewed from, and the kind of content shown.
Screens are getting steadily bigger and for more ambitious projects there is also increasing interest in non-rectangular shapes, using products such as Christie Digital’s MicroTiles, which let you build displays in almost any pattern. There’s also scope for creativity in deciding where to locate your screens. High on the wall isn’t the only answer; displays can be wrapped around pillars, or built into tables. Interactivity through touchscreens is also becoming commonplace.
Each screen, or a group of screens in the same area, is served by a media player – a small box of electronics which plays out the content to the displays, much as a DVD player does to a television. The difference is that these media players don’t take discs; instead, they’re all linked on a network and receive content that way. (DVDs, flash disks and the like are occasionally used to distribute content to screens around the school, but that’s an old-fashioned approach and now rare.)
At the heart of this network sits the management software, which performs two main tasks: it allows whoever is responsible for the network to monitor its performance (by alerting them to malfunctioning screens, for example), and it lets them designate what content should be played where, and when.
Simple template-based content can often be created within the software tools supplied to run the screen network; more sophisticated programming such as video or animations will require dedicated software.
There are thousands of permutations of hardware and software available, meaning that this is one field where educators must work hard to educate themselves before committing to a system. Events like Screenmedia expo in Earls Court 2 – the pre-eminent show for users of this new technology, held on 18-19 May this year – provide an opportunity to sample what’s available, and to talk to companies and institutions that have already gained hands-on experience of the challenges and benefits of screen media in schools.
www.screevevents.co.uk/screenmediaexpo2011
