Video Announcements, Text Notifications, and Emergency Alerts - Oh My!

Okay. I see people coming in. Thank you so much for coming. Everybody can see my screen. We're all good. Awesome. Welcome to Video Announcements, text Notifications, and emergency Alerts. Oh, my. I've been super excited about this webinar coming up because I have some incredible districts, leaders, educators, people sharing about all of the awesome ways they're using VIVI in their schools and districts. So I first want to kick off with a fun little start. Now, let's see if you know what this is from.

Attention, seniors. Before the merriment of commencement commences, I hope that your years with us here at Rydell High have prepared you for the challenges you face. Who knows, among you, there may be

a future Eleanor Roosevelt or a Rosemary Clooney. And among you young men, there may

be a Joe DiMaggio, a President Eisenhower, or even a Vice President Nixon.

But always you will have the glorious

memories of Rydell High.

Rydell forever. Bon voyage.

So, any panelists, we know where this is from, So I won't make you listen to it again. The big reason, one, everyone gets very nostalgic when we see that clip. So very fun. Also, kind of the funny slash sad reality is that a lot of our announcements still look like that in a lot of school districts, and I mean all over. And so our instruction has changed so much, has shifted so much. But we've been still using things that have been used for decades of what that looks like, how we engage students and how we actually share information updates and inspire those with those words that you just saw. So today, what we're going to be talking about is we're going to have a little welcome and introductions. What is vivi? So some of you here may be current VIVI customers and know what VIVI is so you can kind of get a little update. Some folks will be are new to vivi, and so we want to make sure we kind of share a little bit about what it is. Then you'll get to hear from these lovely panelists about VIVI in action at their schools around video announcements that they sometimes use in a very different way than what you just saw from Greece and text notifications and emergency alerts. And then we'll have a panel discussion and some audience Q and A. Before we jump in there, I'd like to introduce my panelists, so I'll have you guys come off mute. And unfortunately, Justin Dover is not with us today. He is sick, so we're very sad to miss him. But we will be sending along some resources he shared in his absence.

So.

So First, James, would you like to introduce yourself?

I'm James Bigley. I'm lead systems engineer at Cleveland county schools in Shelby, North Carolina, about 30, 40 miles west of Charlotte.

Thank you.

About six years there.

Awesome. Thank you. Next, Carrie.

Hello. I'm Kerry Moulton. I'm the technology integration support specialist for Bourbonay Elementary School District in Illinois. It's about 40 minutes south of Chicago.

Thank you. Lisa and Jesse.

Hi, Everybody. I'm Lisa LeBlanc. I'm an educational technology coach in Livingston, New Jersey, former World Language teacher, and

my name is Jesse Allard. I'm the systems administrator for Livingston Public Schools.

Awesome.

Thank you so much. And I guess I should introduce myself. I'm Juliana Finnegan, VP Educator experience here at vivi. I was a classroom teacher for a while and. And so super excited to engage in this conversation. Some quick rules of engagement for webinars. All attendees will be muted. This is to make sure that we can kind of keep going with the conversation. Also, I just realized I didn't introduce Katherine, who's on here, who's going to be helping us with the Q and A. Katherine, would you like to introduce yourself?

Hey. Hey. Katherine Vaughn. I'm the VP of Customer Success here at vivi, and I will happily answer any questions you have in the Q and A.

Perfect. Thank you so much. So place any questions you have throughout the discussion into the Q and A, and those will be answered. And then also, the webinar is being recorded and will be provided to all attendees and those who weren't able to make it within 24 hours. So super excited to share that with you all. So what is vivi? So VIVI is a little blue box. My daughter likes to call it the little robot because it looks like it has little ears. We also have the Vivi display app. You can attach the Vivi box to any interactive flat panel TV or projector to allow teachers to wirelessly screen share and even students to wirelessly screen share, the Vivi display app will go onto your Android. Interactive flat panels can be downloaded pretty much as an app itself, so you don't need the box. Now, with the box, you get a treasure trove of instructional tools that allows students to write on whiteboards, teachers to annotate, pause screen, tons of different ways to build teacher capacity and impact student learning, all built into that little blue box. Now, also, the big thing here is the VIVI also attaches all of your screens to each other. So that means with HDMI cec, you can actually power up all of the screens. You can share information. All those screens, which is what we're going to be talking about today, really, those video announcements. You can also send text notifications. Teachers can move classroom to classroom. So it enables flexibility on many levels. Also, one of our favorite things from our VIVI EC is vivicentral. This allows you to remotely work with all of those vivi. So there's a heartbeat every two minutes. If it goes offline, you, you find out right away. You're not finding out from the teacher when they walk into their classroom and going, it's not working. You can remotely update it. Also you can see all of the data that you kind of see here, which is how many hours are students sharing, how many hours are teachers sharing? That really helps with coaching and just being able to do everything from digital signage, emergency alert, set up permissions. I see some nodding from my VIVI educator council members. This is really saving a ton of time because you're able to remotely access all of those VIBIs from across and then it is device agnostic and tool agnostic. So really getting to build that connective tissue to attach all of the different tools that are already in your schools and systems. Anybody want to add anything to that? So I saw some nodding. No.

Okay,

so why are we focusing on video announcements, text notifications and emergency alerts? I like to call these features kind of the unlock features. They are unlocked when you have VIVI enabled screens across your entire school or your entire system. Because by having it in every single classroom, you are able to again power on those screens and have morning announcements start off the day with joy. These features are focused on building a stronger sense of community and connection, feelings of safety and security. I know some folks have after an emergency, the principal goes on and says, okay, we're all okay. You guys did a great job having that human connection. And then also it's easy and seamless communications that match the models of today like you just saw with Greece. A lot of those classrooms were very quiet at that moment. Right with the sage on the stage and everyone very quiet and listening hopefully at that time. But now we have small group instruction. We have student led learning. Very different. So how are we changing the way we build in announcements and the way we share information within those contexts? Just a real quick about what these things are. So emergencies, how it works. Again, it can be enabled from. You need permissions to obviously put out an emergency alert. You can say where those emergencies go. And different screens can get different notifications. Like this one. This area has a visual of going outside to the left or to the right, you can see here they enable it, which classrooms. And then you can see different rooms have different signage based on what is needed to be done in those rooms. So that's for the emergency alerts. Now, announcements, very similar. Again, if you have a VIVI enabled screen across the board, then you are able to turn them on. There's instruction happening in different classrooms. You want to make video announcement or a live announcement. All you need is your computer. You sit in front of it, you set which classrooms are going to get it, and it takes over all of those screens. You'll see all of a sudden starting video announcements and it will take over what's happening in those screens. So no longer sending out links to get somebody to click on it to watch this. Hey, we all need to see this. You're able to really build that seamless and aligned experience across the board. And then the last one is text notifications. Again, this is all based on permissions and vivicentral. So a front office staff can say, instead of calling and saying, can you please send Juliana to the office, you can actually put in a quick text notification, say how long you want it to stay on that screen, which screen it's going to. And it won't interrupt instruction, but. But it will make sure that that student is notified that they need to come to the front office very quickly. So I just went through that really quick just so that you have a base of, you know, what are these three things? What is video announcements, emergency alerts and text notifications. But now I'm going to stop talking because I'm not as interesting and I'm going to hand it over to the Livingston Public Schools team.

Hi, I'm Jesse and this is Lisa. So I'll start by just saying that we have 242 Vivi boxes. We're a pre K through 12 school district and our 7th through 12th classes use Vivian every of their classrooms. We also have a couple devices at the elementary schools and in the hallways that we use as signage and to play our morning announcement program. And the reason that we initially went with bivvy was for wireless projection. Just the convenience aspect of that and not having to maintain all those messy wires in classrooms. But it's become so much more than that as Lisa can add on.

Yeah.

So our teachers, I think right now their favorite use is the fact that they can use it as a separate screen. So especially when those morning announcements are playing, it's going straight through the VIVI and they don't have to be playing it from their device so they can be taking attendance and getting up all their materials for the day without worrying about interrupting what's on the screen in front of the students. So they really love being able to use it that way or even just to extend their screen during classroom instruction as well when they are projecting. And today we're going to mostly be talking about the way that we're. We're using it a little bit differently. We're using the digital signage feature instead of the announcements feature, but with the ultimate goal of streaming our video announcements that we have video announcements that are made by the students for the students. And the kids really love it. And the VIVI has taken it to the next level. So we have just a couple clips to kind of share with you. You want to explain this one?

This is our morning announcement program at the high school. We have two TV studios at our high school. About 2,000 students in total at our high school. And it's a really amazing studio. These students really know what they're doing. It's all student run, student produced. All that we're doing is taking the link that. That our local public access station sets up for us and we're sending that through Bivy. And it makes it so seamless in the classrooms that a teacher can just show up, turn on the projector, and there it is. So you could go ahead and play part of this video.

So they do the intro. I'm going to jump here.

Announcements. The trial Blazers for Kids club will hold an introductory meeting after school in room D264 on Thursday. We'll be discussing plans for the new school year. If you have any questions, you can contact Ms. Lafferty. The Filipino club will be holding its first meeting of the year on tomorrow after school and B245 board meeting members will be introduced and plans for upcoming activities will be discussed. Contact Jonas Nadal with any questions I'm going to show.

I got to watch this yesterday and there's a great little clip. Here we go.

Lately it's just been test after test, assignment after assignment. I can't remember the last time I actually did something fun.

Yeah, if only there were a homecoming

or something to put me into the fall spirit. But wait, there is. LHS is finally having homecoming on Friday, October 17th, in the field house.

No way. I knew the rumors were true. When can I get tickets this week?

Actually, from today to Thursday after school in room E286. Oh, and did I mention the theme is under the Stars?

Sounds like exactly What I've been waiting for. Tell me there's a spirit week, too.

Well, obviously.

Well, so what are we waiting for

now? Let's get back to dating. Now, are we excited for homecoming? I'm excited for the fruit brunch. That's not what I asked, but let's get back to you guys.

Announcements.

And just to reiterate, this is all a student run, student produced, all students behind the camera running this show. And VIVI just makes it so it's live, too, in the morning. VIVI makes it so seamless that we can send this out to all the classrooms live. Everybody's watching at the same time. They even have features like hdmi cec, where you can automatically turn on the projectors. And it really simplifies the setup that we have.

Awesome.

Want to go to the next slide? This is Lisa's.

Yeah.

So this is at our middle school. We have a seventh and eighth grade middle school that uses VIVI to show the morning announcements. And so it's a similar setup, but it's not live. We have a class where the 8th graders get a chance to record the video announcements. It's a very different setup. The high school has these crazy TV studios, and we just use Chromebooks and WeVideo and Vivi, so we're a little bit more simple. But we recorded the day before. And then the teachers just turn on their projector in the morning. We have this little bit of buffer time in the beginning because our principal likes to come on and say the pledge of allegiance over the PA system still. And so we give a little bit of buffer time and then those morning announcements start playing. So if you want to play a little clip. Yeah, let's skip a few minutes there,

I think.

Oh, there we go. Brianna, Happy birthday today to.

Here are the announcements for today.

The Youth Environmental Society will have its first meeting today after school in room 103. If you can't make it this afternoon, no worries. Stop by any Tuesday.

You're free.

We're always accepting new members.

There will be an interest meeting for student council today.

And I also liked that. Here we go. We have our sports.

Bucher scored three goals and Skyler Aarons added a goal as well. Congratulations. The heritage girls tennis team won their second game this season against Kent Place with a score of 3 2. In second doubles, Jessica Liu and Emma Bai won their match 8 1. In fourth doubles, Logan Mendelsohn and Andy Glazer won their match 8 2. And in fifth doubles, Alaya Sethi and Mashika Tripathi.

And our students really, really love features.

Sorry. Go for it. No, it's okay. Go for it.

This about a girl named Melody who has cerebral palsy. She cannot walk, talk, or write, but

she has a brilliant mind and photographic memory.

Most people assume she isn't smart, but Melody knows more than they realize. When she gets a special computer that lets her speak, she finally has a way to share her thoughts.

Lisa I love showing this one because she's literally sitting by her lockers.

Yeah.

And is able to even do it there.

Yep. We spread out all over the halls. We have on site reporters. Sometimes we call them our field reporters. And they go out and interview teachers and they just take, you know, pictures around the school. They do scavenger hunts. They really get very creative with the features that they have in there. And it really. I'll be sitting in my office and the classrooms on either side of me will be like yelling out at the tv, the, at the projectors. You know, they'll do quizzes and they'll do guess that celebrity, Guess that teacher. And the kids are all so engaged watching the morning announcements, especially because it's made by other students, so they really want to pay attention.

And before we implemented vivi, this was a manual process where the teachers would have to play it on their computer. Nobody's watching at the same time. A lot of times the teachers would forget or there would be a substitute. But with vivi, this is all seamless and automatic.

Yeah. Awesome. Thank you guys so much for sharing. This is bringing a wonderful bit of joy for us in the morning as well. Next, Cleveland county schools. James.

So as you can see, we have close to 1200 bivvies out there on every TV we can think of. We're going to expand further. We have 28 sites. Unfortunately, we're what they call site based management. So every school was different. So we wanted to come up with a solution that everybody used. And going back to what Jesse and them were saying about the morning announcements, we would have one that would spend a lot of money on this huge studio stuff. Another one want something different. And it was all costly. And it's. From a technician standpoint, this is much easier to fix than 10 different things. So that's another good thing about the more announcements. We originally, as you can see, we had Apple TVs. The problem with that is you have a substitute comes in, they don't have the. Don't have an Apple product. They have a Chromebook, they can still use it. So we wanted a multi platform solution that everybody could Use. And it's very simple to use. Of course we use signage and emergency alerts, which we'll talk about emergency alerts in a little bit. I believe when we get to just the practical use of the video announcement, it's. It's a great way to get the information out there and has already been mentioned. We can turn TVs on. So even if they don't have it on, it'll come on. They could see it. No, nobody has to click anything. So very user friendly, very simple to use. From students to administrators can use it. So. And my slides aren't as good as the previous ones because we're not quite that fancy yet, but we're getting better at it. The mistake we made up front is we didn't get our instructional coaches involved in teaching teachers how to use the vivi. So we're playing ketchup. That's why ours is not as fancy as New Jersey. This is one of our cafes that, that they play during the day. They also. I didn't show the. The menus, but they also do ones with menus. Julian, I had nothing to do with that slide, even though I'm a Navy man, but sure, yeah, yeah.

And who sets up these, this digital signage?

What was that?

Do all different people set up the digital signage?

Yes, we currently at each site have one person that's responsible for it. But we go with Google Slides because we're a Google platform. So it makes it easy. You just add the slides in and automatically next time it cycles through, that new slide will be there. So we found that to be the easiest. And now they, they just incorporated canvas. So we're going to test that out here shortly. So they can do using with that.

Awesome.

Yeah, that's good on that one.

And then this one is.

Yeah, this is from the. The same high school as a matter of fact. They have their field house. It's got 17 TVs in it. High school, believe it or not. But they, they, they just do fancy things on their signage that they have. There it is. I mean you can be as simple or elaborate as you want to be with this. The box. Don't care. It'll play it.

I love it. Thank you so much. Now this was. This got me dancing yesterday when I was playing it. So thank you so much. Next. Carrie.

Hello. So in Bourbon A, we have been using Vivi for about four years now. We have 226 boxes. We are K8 district. So one of the reasons we reached out for vivi, actually VIVI reached out to Us but we were looking for some kind of casting device. Teachers wanted to cast their devices. We wanted something that we could be able to control and VIVI fit the package. Our current favorite use is video announcements. And I'll be kind of talking to you about how we use video announcements in our K3 buildings to bring the morning message. And we do use signage a lot in our districts as well. Are actually the problem we're having is our buildings keep buying TVs for signage so we keep having to buy more vivies. It's a great problem to have. But in our K3 building, in two of our buildings we have morning announcements where the kids as they come in in the morning they're getting their folders ready and getting their set for the day. The building principals and a student come on and have the announcements. They say the pledge, they say their tiger pledge. And it really brings culture to the school and the kids love seeing their friends on it. They love going up there and doing it. There's a joke of the day and the building principal loves it because she's like I'm in the classroom every single day. She physically can't be in the classroom because there's only one of her but she can now be in it with video announcements. So that would be one of the things that we love.

There's a cute.

This is a close up of what they say and the kids and they do the motions and everything in the corner too.

Awesome. I'm thank you so much Gary for sharing. I'm going to do a very quick share for Justin. For har school they had 90 boxes. 1012 originally bought it for wireless screen sharing digital signage. And their main focus that he was going to discuss was emergency alerts. A big thing he pushed for with emergency alerts and you'll hear some about this is that he has different signage for a drill versus a real emergency. To really make sure that the students know like this is a drill. Let's practice. This is a real emergency and having that illustration and this was actually built on top of what they already had for emergency alerts but really making sure that they had backups to backups for them and I can share out. He put together a VIVI API recommendations based on his experience with connecting all of those and a wonderful PDF form and we will have that and we also have that in our Community Exchange which is a internal forum for VIVI customers to kind of share best practices, share ideas and so we can also share that as well with the recording so you can jump in and see some of the things people are sharing. So to why we are here. Super excited panel discussion. Again, if you have any questions, please put them in the Q and A. And Catherine can help with those. But super excited to hear from you all. So thank you. So this is for everybody before Vivi. You know, I just keep thinking back to that lovely clip from Greece. I don't know if any of you guys had like a dun dun, dun. I mean, maybe how are you handling daily announcements, communications or alerts? And what challenges did you face? Anyone want to jump in?

First, I will say one of the challenges our teachers had and they didn't like it. The secretaries didn't see it as a problem, but the teachers hated it, is anytime they needed something, they would intercom in the room via the phone and they would be like Mrs. Moulton, so and so. But anytime they did, the phone's in one corner and the teacher is usually in the other corner. And the classroom's not quiet so they can't hear and it's like yelling back and forth. So now that we have some of the things that we have, like text announcements, it works so much better because they lose that interruption,

that barrier of entry.

Yeah, our school system had the old buttons by the door with the built in speaker on the wall. It sounded like, was it Charlie Brown's teacher? So when we incorporated ours is, we incorporated it through our informacast and fortinet system. So when we do a panic button, they press that. It does speakers, call speakers. We have clocks in every room that has speakers and the phones also. And of course it locks the. On the screen on the previous slide she was showing, it displays something up there saying that there's a lockdown. Of course you can do it for tornadoes, whatever the case may be, but so much easier, so much better. And people actually see that instead of wondering what's being said over the speaker from the old system,

we had something very similar where they would come over a speaker built into the wall and all the announcements went through there, whether it was just for one classroom or for everybody. And then we found that, you know, there were some rooms that didn't really hear any of the announcements or, you know, like Kari said that it's. It's just too loud in the classroom and the kids just don't pay attention. So a lot of stuff was getting missed.

At our high school, we. We actually did have a video announcement program prior to implementing vivi, but like I said earlier, it was such a manual process to have to play it on your Teacher MacBook, share your screen. And it would be glitchy doing it that way. We had these really old televisions from, like the 70s or 80s. But as you add on rooms to classrooms, it becomes very difficult to maintain that really old equipment. And with vivi, you just order another box, put it in with the projector.

Awesome. I think about too, with the emergency alerts and things like that, like, it was like one buzz, Is this two buzzes? Is this three buzzes? I was like, was that three buzzes or two buzzes or one buzz? I don't know. And so definitely there's been a lot of changes. So thank you guys so much for sharing that Now. So what motivated your school or district to move away from those traditional PA systems? I know you guys said some about this already to video announcements. And what impact have you seen so far? So maybe we'll like, lean into, like, what impact have you seen from community? A culture sharing any of those.

So we, like we said before, a lot of people were missing things over the PA system. They would do a morning announcement over the PAs, and then they would repeat stuff in the afternoon and hopes that if you missed it in the morning, you might hear it in the afternoon. And it was always coming from either an administrative assistant or one of the principals. And the kids, you know, like we said before, it sounds like they just kind of tuned out. So now that we have student face in front of the students, not only is it video, it's a format that they enjoy, but it's also their peers that they're listening to. So they're far more engaged in actually listening to the announcements. And because of that, we've actually seen an increase in participation in the events that we're hosting at our school, whether it's clubs or things that happen on the weekends. Like, we just had a Hispanic Heritage Month event at our high school. We had a lot of students come out and support all of those different activities.

That's amazing.

I just want to add one little thing to this is what we do is for. I don't know if you call them PTOs or PTAs, depending on where you're from, but we actually will set up an emergency lockdown situation so the parents get to see it. So they may hear, the kids may talk about it and all that, but actually getting the parents involved and seeing what you can do with it is very helpful.

That's awesome. Anyone else before I move on? So I think you guys all brought this up too, but, like, and these are super interesting, different experiences of like, how to just kind of amplify what you are doing in an easier, more seamless way. And then thinking about the students who are involved in creating that stuff. I mean, those were some pretty amazing videos all around. What has that meant for your school culture and engagement all around? I saw Kerry right away just hit unmute. So go for it.

So I'll say for us in our K3 right now, it has brought that culture of belonging and engaging. The students love to see their friends, and we don't really have them involved in the creating. They're more involved in the delivering. But like the building principal has the kid and they go through the slide before and we do a joke of the day and the kids kind of get to be themselves during the joke of the day and they can kind of like, they laugh and they have fun. And so it just brings that, like, it's okay to have fun in school and just enjoy each other's company and belong. And so I definitely think having them deliver that and seeing their peers be like, that is great for your school.

I love just like that you guys announced the birthdays. I mean, imagine growing up and having your birthday announced and not have to be like, so guys, it's my birthday today. You know, when you're a kid, it's so important and so exciting. So I love that too. Thank you.

So add that. I think it brings a sense of responsibility to our kids that are on the announcement. They become like the face of the school. And so we say that when we encourage kids to sign up for these classes, that's like, you're going to be seen. Everybody's going to know who you are, whether you know them or not. And you get to be kind of like an ambassador for the school. So they really take that very seriously and they really want to make the announcements the best that they can.

I'll also say, like for us, because we also do the break the birthdays or like, you're getting called down to read with a principal and it makes the school office not that safe, scary, you're in trouble place, but that place where you want to go and it's fun. And so it takes away that stigma of, oh, the office is bad.

I love that I wasn't here last week, but they, they did this challenge between all the elementary schools for attendance and they lip sync to whatever song and dance to it and they would play it at another school. So it's kind of that rivalry, but was all around showing up for school. So I mean you can do things like that too, right? Or we've had the superintendent do kind of like a State of the Union address to everyone. So I mean there's. It's endless what you can do with this thing. So I mean, what. It's whatever your imagination is.

I love that. And we might need to see some of the videos of the lip syncing dance. I mean, that's pretty incredible. What a great way to start the day.

Yeah, they have them. I've seen them on Facebook because they posted them to there too. But I didn't actually see the actual function, but it turned out really good. The kids really liked it.

That's awesome. So I was going to say, I feel like we just already jumped ahead here with the. Create a strong sense of connection in classroom campuses.

Just.

I love that, James, that you just shared of even sharing two other campuses to say, you know, like having a competition and building that engagement there. And I also just think of all of the skills these students are building from a confidence from a presentation and those things are going to follow them, you know, and being really like future ready in a sense. Is there anything else you guys would like to add from a sense of connection or. Or any different skills you're seeing from the. An involvement from the video announcements in

terms of club participation, if, if you have students in a club that are very, you know, creative and want to make their own video, there's plenty of students at our high school that edit in Premiere or whatever editing software they want to use and they make these really creative videos that, that really, you know, pop to the students watching and make people want to join that club when they see something like that.

That's awesome. So now I'm going to shift gears. We talked about really video announcements and how you can leverage VIVI to both turn on the screens, make sure everyone's getting to experience it, make sure everyone is connected and kicking off the day with that type of joy, sharing togetherness with that same unlock feature, you're able to again kind of control what can be on the screen by sharing text notifications like you saw with the little demo there. And so I'd love to hear how can you share an example of how text notifications saved you time, reduced confusion. And I know you talked about just like the lovely marathon running across the room to get the phone and actually answer the phone and see if you can hear anyone on set phone, but is there anything else on a, like improved coordination and just reducing that friction.

So I have two examples One we had a actual intercom, like it was the old fashioned one obviously in the wall that we still use. But one of them shorted out in one of our classrooms and it took a bit for us because, you know, it's an older thing to get it back up and running. So the office then instead of calling into that room, they could just send text notifications. That way instead of, you know, trying to either walk to the room or get a hold of the teacher, reduce that. The other example is, I'm sure your office could probably test attest to this, but there's always that one teacher that forgets to take attendance. And so the nice thing about text notifications, especially because this, this did not come out when it first came out, but it has since. You can see, schedule a daily notification, daily text announcement to go out to that room to remind the teacher to take attendance instead of, you know, sending the email or calling down. It's less disruptive. It also gets the kids involved because they can then gently remind the teacher to take attendance as well.

By the way, I'm just seeing everyone's faces laughing because we all know that struggle of being like, please just take attendance. Like, we just need to know that they're okay and I'll, I'll own it. There was times when I didn't take attendance right away. Right. You got into a lesson. But having that little quick visual reminder is definitely quite helpful. Awesome. Thank you. So again, so the text notifications again switching gears and these are all those unlock pieces. So with the same kind of, essentially the fact that you can connect all of the VIVI boxes together, it also allows them to be a visual display for emergencies and do those visual alerts. What made you decide to actually, because I know a lot of people already have something in place. So, like, what made you decide to activate the vivi's emergency alert feature and how has it changed your safety planning? James, I'm going to send this to you.

Yeah, it's a big. Well, unfortunately, the world is what it is today and anything we can, we must do to make it safer for our kids out there. So being that being the way it is, we've seen this as a viable solution to the previous discussed stuff. So that was the biggest advantage. And what we also did, as a side note, we did a safety grant and that's how we was able to get a bunch more bivvies out there. So that's always something you could look into if you don't have the funds to have a bunch of them. Out there tied into safety, and you get money for that. So, I don't know. It changes the way we know that we're getting the word out now. We haven't. You have a feature where every teacher could do an emergency alert, but we're kind of skeptical on that. We're leaning into it a little bit because unfortunately, sometimes teachers leave their computers, go across the room, and little Johnny decides to go through and click something. So we're trying to figure out how to do a way to where we don't automatically have an accidental alert and we don't do the test drill versus the real thing. We just do the straight. It's an alert. And one of the bad notes that we did one time is when we originally was doing this, because we do code reds every school every month. We missed an equals mark in our little script, and it ended up sending it to every VIVI in our district. So everybody thought we were having something locked down or something. So you got to be careful with that. But it also shows that you need to. You can send something out to every district, every school in your district. So, you know, if you just have it just one place, and you have a school that's a half a mile down road, they need to know this, too, in case somebody's outside shooting or whatever the case may be, they need to know they need to go there in lockdown also. So that. That. That's the big part of why we tied into the emergency alert feature.

And that's. That's so important and such a good flag of, like, you know, especially when our schools are so close to each other. You know, how do you have a system that can not only let that school know what's happening, but like you said, you know, share that. And that can all be done through VIVI Central because you have the ability to kind of, like, bring them together. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I think you shared on this a little bit. But simplifying your tech stack is the fact that you said it's like the same thing you're using for wireless screen sharing, digital signage for your video announcements, and it's also helping with your emergency alert. So it's not just having, like, one thing, one thing, one thing, one thing, but you're able to kind of do it across. Is there anything else like that you guys, anyone or James would like to add about just, you know, how is having VIVI really helped you with simplifying your tech stack kind of overall? Like, I love how you guys are also kind and you're like, should I not do it? Can somebody, somebody else going to do it, go for it.

I would like to add in terms of simplifying, like the burden on our help desk staff having a seamless solution where you just go into a classroom and you know what to expect. It really helps. Especially if you have teachers that are traveling between rooms or between buildings. They know that they're going to get a projector with vivi, they know how to use vivi. It already works, there's no question about it. Whereas before, am I supposed to bring a dongle with me? With VGA hdmi, it gets very confusing if you're going between different rooms and if you have multiple people sharing a room.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Jesse. Okay, we got one last question. So for those who are attending who may not have VIVI yet or may only have a few vivies, school or district starting to explore these features or VIVI in general, what advice would you give them to help them get quick wins and build? Buy in early on. So I'll have each of you guys share kind of like what would be your tips and tricks on rolling it out or starting to explore these features.

Okay. Request the demo first. VIVI is excellent at coming in, giving you something to play with, and not just leaving you hanging. They will actually go through it, explain it, help you set things up. I mean, when we first originally set it up, I mean, it was like Johnny on the spot, you need to go here, this is what we're doing. Oh, you don't understand that. Well, this is why you're doing it. I mean, they were just probably the best technical support I've seen of any of the vendors that we deal with. But I shared with one of our EC conference things was we also got our board involved with it, school boards on with it to get the parents involved. It makes it so much easier to implement it. And even the, the oh, we have. I won't say oh because that's a bad way to say that. We have older teachers and younger teachers and this is a trans generation here. Even the new people can do it. The older people can do it. They're not all confused like they were saying earlier, not going from room to room, whether you had a dongle, not a dongle. You don't have to worry about that. Anybody can come in and use it.

Awesome. Thank you so much, James.

There is a bulk upload feature as well in, in vivi, if you have a list of rooms that you can put on a spreadsheet. You just scan the barcodes on the, on the vivies. It's very easy to distribute them. There's a lot of training on online as well provided by Vivi and they really listen to your feedback. If you say, you know, here' an issue that we're experiencing or here's a suggestion. A lot of the suggestions that have been implemented are brought to Vivy's attention by teachers, by administrators and VIVI customers.

I think for me on the instructional side too, the quick win is just how easy it is to use. I had to bring this out to teachers, roll it out basically on the first day of school. So I met with all the teachers and I showed them just how easy it is to connect and share their screen and they all walked in super nervous, like, oh no, is this going to work? And they all walked out like, oh, that was so easy. And so just being able to get people up and running is really a piece of cake. And then it also has so many other features and so many other uses that you're really getting a lot of different choices for one device that you're paying for.

Awesome.

I will also say the demo that gets your stakeholders involved and they'll, once they see how it works, it's perfect. The other thing I tell people is start small, don't try and do live announcements on your first day. You know, try that simple things first. Just getting used to it and then increase it tends to work out so much better. And then the last thing I usually say about Vivi is I always prayed their support team because they're amazing, they help you. I've never had a faster support team when I have to put in technical support, which is usually very limited. But VIVI is great. They always support their customers and they listen and they take the products like requests from us and make it even better all the time.

My heart is so happy. I love hearing that. And I swear, like, I think it's exciting to see too. Just in the time I've been at Vivi, how many of those product updates have come from customers? We just did stream to students which came directly from teachers saying, hey, is there a way to stream directly to a student's device to give them accessibility to content? And we're like actually in the engineering team. The product team got on it and now it was just released. So really listening to it. So thank you guys so much. I'm not sure. Is there any questions been coming in? Catherine, is there anything to share for questions from the audience?

Actually perfect timing for you to ask that we actually got a bit of a feature request that came through and I asked Josh to submit it to our product portal, which everyone has access to in vivicentral. If you go under support, you can actually access our product portal and make suggestions directly. Product feature requests directly. What I told Josh is I can make the request for you and pass it on to our product team, but it always means more to coming from our customers. And as you just stated, we crowdsource all of our features. It comes from you. So if you do have feedback, of course, tell your VIVI contact, but know that you can always go in to our product portal in VIVI Central under support and submit a request.

Thank you so much, Katherine. And actually, in that product portal, you can even thumbs up things, look through everything. Like, this is something I'd really like to have. Like, that's okay. I don't really need that that much. And it kind of helps to push things to the front of the line. So definitely there for current customers. Like Catherine mentioned, if you have any questions or need more VIVI subscriptions. Because now you're like, wait, if I have a VIVI in every single space, I can do video announcements, I can do emergency alerts, I can do these text notifications. Please reach out to your customer success manager. If you don't know who that is, you can reach out to the wonderful customer Catherine and she will point you in the right direction. If you are not a VIVI customer, book a demo. And I love that. You guys really teed me up for that. So thank you. Book a demo. You can do a free pilot. You can try it out in your schools and really see, like, hey, is this what we need it for? How do we try it out? How can we try out some of those features? Book a demo here and just try it out. Yep, you can raise your hand.

Yes, Catherine, I would also say that we have quite a few promotions going on right now as we finish up 2025. So if you are looking to test VIVI out in your environment or expand vivi, do let us know because there are a few promos in play right now.

Thank you so much for the flag. Yes, there's a bunch of promos going on right now. When you book the demo, you can kind of find out which one is going to save you the most. And let's see. And we just wanted to thank you guys so much for your time today and thank. Big thank you to the panel. Thank you guys so much for sharing. This was like, so much fun just hanging out with you all and hearing all of these stories. And I might have to watch those videos a few more times because they are just so uplifting and I love

seeing

the students in action. So do you guys have any other things you'd like to share? If not, they're all like, no, we're tired. Thank you guys so much. I hope everyone enjoys the rest of their day. We will be sending out this recording so that you can share with other folks. And thank you all for attending as well.

It.