Vivi Customer Spotlight: Kingsway Christian College

Hi, my name is Mark Callaou, I'm the director of Information Technology and Learning at Kingsway Christian College. We're a private college independent in Western Australia with about 1400 students. We've been running for approximately 30 something years and we service the north of Perth EWA. We like the central administration of all the devices. We like the central and standardized administration of making sure that all the screens were identical and at a click of a button someone in their office could actually adjust them or upgrade them and do the general management of them. The other reasons for us selecting the vivies is also we didn't find a suitable technology that was independent of the monitors that we could actually run within our school. For example, if you go with a particular brand of the projector or at least the interactive whiteboards or a touch screen, you needed to invest into their system. Because we have 90 something plus audio visual spaces that becomes different difficult for us as technology changes. So we were looking for something that was independent of the actual display device. So we've got spaces that have interactive monitors, non interactive monitors, small projectors, we've got LED projector in our auditorium. We've got lots of different types of display devices that we're able to use. That is something that we weren't able to achieve with other products or other vents or we had to lock into their system which meant we couldn't actually use it for all situations. With the vivies our teachers have been more effective and one of the interesting things that has come out of this is the bi directional conversations from their computers which was something that we weren't able to do. The teachers have really jumped onto the idea benefits that we've actually found is that the teachers are now able to do more creative things in the interactivity with the students. So one of the things I've seen with one of our teachers is that she would literally walk around the classroom and then highlight some special work that one student had completed and then throw that to screen and allow that student to actually be acknowledged and encouraged on the great work that they, that student, he or she had done. And so it creates a new way of actually getting involvement within the students. The other thing is that as they're walking around the students are also aware that at any time their screen might be put up onto the, onto the monitor or the projector and therefore they're actually a little bit more in tune and a little bit more paying attention because they, they might be called upon to actually talk about or discuss what they're actually dealing with. In the class. Feedback around the VIVI on time saving has been extraordinary. People love the fact that they don't have to look for dongles as a. It doesn't seem like a time related issue, but actually the time wasted by trying to find or make sure that you have the right dongle with you. Because as you go into different rooms, they have different adapters, VGA versus HDMI, etc. That actually has been a huge time saver for us. So from a teaching perspective, they love that they can just walk into the room, the VIVI is there, they just click on one app and they're connected. That is a huge benefit from them because they're not worrying about whether this thing, this adapter is plugged in correctly or if the last person yanked it a little bit harder and pulled out the cable. So for peace of mind from the teaching perspective, actually it translates to a time saving benefit because within a couple of seconds they're already up and ready. Other time saving benefits for us is the centralization that we know that whenever there's a problem, we are able to quickly resolve that just by upgrading. We've saved hours and hours of not having to attend classrooms to try and troubleshoot because we go through the basics and look at the raw metrics and see, okay, how much has the classroom been used? And so we can see quite quickly that the problem occurred around this time that has enabled us to look at, oh, actually it's a problem with the network, not necessarily with the display device. And that actually has reduced downtime because we, we're now no longer running around the campus fixing problems that are misdiagnosed. That's actually been a significant benefit for us that as an IT team in particular have really gained benefit from. VIVI has helped us out in other ways, particularly around the COVID 19 situation. In particular, we're using the digital signage feature a little bit more than what we ever had. Primarily the digital signage was used around our public spaces, reception and ready for our open days when we'd actually have masses of people coming in and we wanted to display things about each faculty, et cetera. But the ability to actually broadcast things relatively quickly through messaging on the digital signage actually has been a huge benefit. One of the other ones that we're working through with our teaching staff or sorry, our non teaching staff, is the use of the emergency evac and the lockdown notifications. We do have some situations where we do need to give visual notification of evacuation rather than just audio. And so actually tying in the two has actually been a benefit for us to actually help those people who need that visual notification or with the lockdown situation. We've actually included the steps that each teacher or each person needs to take so it's there in front of them, and then they don't have to remember about it. It's easy for our incident coordinator to just press one button and he knows that everybody has got the same information and follow the same information. The VIVI system had the most comprehensive set of features that aligned to the goals that we were trying to achieve as a college. So it was a very easy decision for us to understand the value that we were going to get out of putting these devices in, rather than having multiple systems that we would need to manage.