James, director of innovation at Prendiville Catholic College, explains how the school uses Vivi wireless AV technology to improve classroom connectivity and safety communication during lockdowns. The system replaced wired solutions and streamlined digital signage across campus.
Hi, I'm James, I'm director of innovation at Prenderville Catholic College. We're a 7 to 12 Catholic college in the northern suburbs of Perth. We've got about a thousand kids at our school and we're part of the Catholic Education of West Australia group of schools.
In our previous role at previous school we'd also looked at providing teachers with some wireless AV Chords are great. More and more teachers doing more digital stuff on their computers. Not only that, they're sharing the stuff they see in the world. A lot of Skype meetings with authors, a lot of showing real life situations and just guiding kids through past models assessments.
So over the last probably four or.
Five years we've tried to look for a better way for that make easier with teachers. We've gone from VGA cores to HMI cores to MiniDevi cords. Cords are always great because they always 100% work but they go missing connectors, adapters and different types of stuff. So about four years ago we started looking at Apple TV's Kramer Viagos and Vivi's were the three most prominent in WA. Met with Vivi people at Edutech a couple of years ago, saw what I could do, spoke to some other schools we visited in schools in Queensland and South Australia and they were using a variety as well. So it's good to see their experience with that. And there was a bit of a lag in moving from cord to wireless and we still don't think we're 100% there yet. But we think we're on the right track now we standardize on vivi. Perennial is a very progressive school. We have a very heavily involved in our solar generation of electricity and VIVI was a solution that gave us the CEC control so the over the HMI cable the VIVI can turn on and turn off the tv. I mean we have a lot of public facing classrooms. Nothing looks worse than TVs on the middle of night because the last teacher was in a bit of a hurry, walks out the door, doesn't turn them on. So we can turn them on in the beginning of the morning or we can turn them off at the end of the day. At the moment we are leaving and running for most of the day to advertise because they're not everywhere in the school yet but it gives a chance to advertising for a few 20 minutes at the beginning of each lesson so teachers are aware of that this room is VIVI enabled and then switch them off if they're not actually being used. So it gives Us those sort of three controls we want to. We can control the tv, we can turn them on to broadcast messages to them. Teachers can automatically turn them on just by streaming to them. But it also gives us that ease of use across the whole school.
As I started this year, I was also doing some planning.
Late last year.
We're having a look at our contingency plans, our risk assessment and pre Covid, believe it or not, we're starting to look at some of the ideas on how we could best manage lockdowns, stage evacuation.
So if there's a problem only in.
Science, there's a gas leak in science. We just want to evacuate there, not panic everybody else. There might be times when we don't want to broadcast through the speakers what's going on. You know, we don't want a shelter in space, so we wanted a solution there and it just happened. When we investigated VIVI for the teachers to use, we found out that we can do it. So we can have a nice silent shelter in place, broadcast to a specific area and we can do that remotely. We can do that off site or.
Not from a central area.
So it's been really handy to have that. We have explored it. We've had. We've been dealing with COVID this year, so we have different things, but it's definitely been a driver for us moving forward to make sure that we've got digital signage in all the key areas, but also that facility to say we're having a lot of trouble with people going like, oh, what was that? What code are we under? What we should be doing. We can very easily put up in those central areas away from public eyes. You know, we're in a sheltering space or only science blocks that are affected. Please continue.
Everybody else like that.
So that's been a really great thing to fill a hole in our risk analysis, moving forward in a new role.
In a new school.
Obviously, any change that comes with a bit of trepidation. You know, how will the staff take this? I've always done it Y X and this works for me. What's the benefit was fairly lucky because we had some issues. We'd gone from old computers to new computers. We used to have VGA cords. We now have USB C computers. It got a little bit difficult, so it was a great time to standardise, for one thing. And once the teachers saw how easy it was, that little blue menu that comes up steps you through the process. Original first weeks where you station day it help person in that learning block. For the first week I think they had two questions, because it literally was. It's there on the screen for you. Step one, step two, step three, and you're away. Like most things, sometimes it went awry. Like any computer, nine times out of 10, it was a reset of the computer that fixed it. But the fact that VIVI has such clear, concise instructions, the only thing we have done to those instructions is write on them what room you're in, just in case. Because sometimes you forget, we move from place to place. That's about the only question we get nowadays is what room I am. And it's great to go.
