This is a YouTube video titled "Vivi Innovator of the Month | Sandra Maher" featuring Sandra Maher, the Director of ICT at Brighton Grammar School in Melbourne. In this video, Sandra discusses her role managing IT infrastructure, cybersecurity, and audiovisual projects at the school. She shares insights about her accidental career path into IT, the variety of her work, and a specific project involving upgrading the school's sports scoreboard to a custom digital billboard using Vivi technology. The content is an informative talk or interview focused on educational technology and IT management in a school setting.
I'm Sandra Ma. I'm the Director of ICT at Brighton Grammar School. So we're in Melbourne. We're a leading Anglican boys school from kindergarten to year 12 private school. My role is to manage and support and deliver all facets of it. We do the network, the infrastructure, the cyber security, telecommunications, disaster recovery, audio, visual for classrooms, events, big projects, innovation, along with obviously the help desk, support for our staff and for our boys. It was actually an accidental career that I have been so lucky to have found myself in. I really wanted to study law and I just missed out. So I was doing commerce at Melbourne Uni and it really wasn't probably for me. I still wanted to do law. So I ended up doing a legal admin course working in a law firm and I helped out the IT director for a little while while I had some staff away and I never left. So I loved it there. I just loved that every day was different. I loved the problem solving, I love helping people, I love the access to new and exciting things and I just found it really interesting and I think because I was working in a law firm at the time, I had the best of both worlds. The thing I find most rewarding about the role is probably definitely the variety of work and going from a big organisation where you necessarily have to have just one niche and you have experts and you work together, you know, collaboratively across the seven different IT areas or realms that we had, it was siloed, whereas now, you know, we get to give everything a go. I love the opportunity to be involved in every facet of the school. It might be something for the library, it could be something some learning requirements, automating processes or human resources. It might be helping the new swim team get their database up and running so they can run a swim meet or live streaming chapel for our church next door and figuring out a redundant solution for our Internet so if they dig up the cable in the street, that we can keep our services, our cloud services, which are essential, up and running to the school via our microwave towers that we've got on the rooftop that, you know, we've got as a sort of a redundant solution, or working with builders on fitting out a new space and how the AV is going to work in there and how the security will work for the doors and all those things, and how we keep the boys safe. So we needed to upgrade and or replace our scoreboard and our oval, which is used for our game days, so cricket and footy mostly. And we were working with the sports department because they kept coming to us saying, well, before you just replace the scoreboard, we've got another few things we'd like to do. And we actually went out to have a look at a professional AFL football club, and we had a look at how they use their scoreboard. And that's what our footy staff were wanting to do. And they took me out there with them and they said, this is what we'd like to do. See this scoreboard? Here's a training session for North Melbourne. And we were watching. They had a room with AV in it and they had this fabulous scoreboard and they had some footage that they played back from the game on the weekend. And the footy players watched the screen and looked at that. And then the coach explained what drills they needed to do. And then they went off and did that, and that was fine. And then he had a wireless mic on, and then he rang back up to the room and he said, okay, now put up the next drill. And then suddenly there was a drill on the scoreboard. And then all of a sudden there was other stuff on the scoreboard. He filmed it and actually played it back up and we would. And I just was a bit anxious and I said, that's absolutely fine. Do you realize there's three people sitting up there with five MacBook Pros and all this cabling? I don't know that I can deliver this for you. I started working through what they're actually wanting, and it occurred to me pretty quickly, what they're actually asking for is just to be able to present anything off a laptop onto the screen. So actually, isn't that just like a classroom? Isn't that just a big outdoor classroom? So VIVI made really quick sense to me. And rather than putting in a standard square scoreboard, which is quite traditional, we actually put in a custom made billboard. Because a billboard has the quality of graphics we needed, separate to what the sport department needed. Our development office also came to us and said, oh, we'd also love to use that scoreboard to put up any digital signage. So again, you know, VIVI was a pretty easy and easy win, to be honest. So it was just a case of making sure that we had the 15 by 9 ratio. So it's the same as a screen. There's no reformatting. And it's simply instead of presenting to a classroom screen, we just happen to be presenting to a very beautiful outdoor billboard. So that's worked really well. There's no training, everybody knows how to use it, and they simply need whatever they'd like. To put up there on the laptop.
