Page 24 - THE Journal, April/May 2017

OUTDOOR AV
schools,” he said. Eventually, he approached his CDW-G rep who helped negotiate the sale from industry vendor KioWare.
“There was a lot of excitement when we were going through our bond election and started getting the community buy-in,” Berger said. “As we look to expand, I believe we’ll be one of the few school districts with such widespread WiFi coverage for our community.”
Inexpensive, Effective and Easy
Even when district leaders are sold on the idea of adding more digital displays outside classrooms, not all of them will have the extra resources to devote to the project. That certainly was the case for Kim Strauss, the director of IT at Brenham ISD, located halfway between Houston and Austin, when two new campuses in her district came to her with a request for digital signage. With no new funds, Strauss began hunting around online, before someone on Twitter suggested she check out Chrome Sign Builder, a free browser extension and utility that works like most other sign-building software.
“We’re a Google [G Suite for Education] district, so we were in tune with how Google applications work,” Strauss said. “So it was something easy to implement in our school district because all our users, adults and students, are familiar with Google products.”
Strauss purchased a handful of 50-inch flatscreen monitors
and connected them with Chromeboxes to connect with the
Sign Builder application (although she’s since switched to using Chomebits, which have a form factor similar to a USB drive). The first monitors went to cafeterias, whose food service department were looking for a way to standardize lunch menus and nutritional information on a timed schedule across campuses.
“Once word spread that we had this inexpensive solution that cost just the hardware, our campuses decided that they wanted
a digital signage solution where they can display things for when parents enter the building,” Strauss said. Now, each campus has its own display near the main entrance, which features a rotating slideshow of events, activities and features on students, teachers and state testing standards. One campus has even requested a display it can place outside and Strauss is hard at work finding a solid weatherproof casing to meet the request.
Brenham’s IT department handles the administrative side of things, sharing individual Google Slides presentations to campus leaders, although Strauss admits managing the scheduling is so easy that almost anyone can figure it out. (To help schools get acquainted with the software, she’s created a simple five-step guide for getting started: tinyurl.com/pdz7usg).
“We took this little idea for food service and it’s grown so much,” she said. “It’s inexpensive; it’s effective; and in districts that have [G Suite], it’s easy because they already know how to manipulate the presentations.”
Stephen Noonoo is a reporter, contributing editor and consultant specializing in education technology.
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Azaze11o; Golden Sikorka/Shutterstock/THE Journal staff