We recently caught up with Chris Murphy, Principal at Cedar Lodge School, located in North Belfast. Cedar Lodge caters for children aged 3-19 with severe learning difficulties, complex needs, or medical difficulties. The school has been using TrilbyTV for almost a decade, so it was fantastic to chat with Chris and hear about how far they’ve come and their plans for the future.
Accessible and engaging displays
When Chris joined the school as Vice Principal, he was working to redevelop the digital requirements across the school infrastructure from the classroom level to whole school initiatives. As part of this, they wanted to bring wall displays to life, which is why they started looking at digital signage. The school also wanted to move away from paper-based ways of celebrating student’s work and so they started using iPads to capture work and create digital notice boards throughout the school.
A key consideration for Chris was that the school needed a means of communication that catered to a range of different communication styles and needs. Some pupils struggled to understand what the traditional signage boards were used for, so it was important that Cedar Lodge found a solution that made this information more accessible to everyone.
At first, Cedar Lodge used an enterprise focussed solution for their digital signage. However, it was time-consuming to use. A key issue was that the tool divided the screens into several boxes, each of which displayed different content. This meant that it had to be configured so that the boxes fit within the dimensions of the screen, which became difficult to manage. As well as this, the tool wasn’t cloud-based, so staff had to be onsite to connect to the server to update the screens.
Luckily, they found out about TrilbyTV at an Apple Regional Training Centre event that Neil Emery, Director at TrilbyTV, was presenting at. Chris saw the product in action and felt that TrilbyTV would be a far better solution moving forwards because it’s intuitive and cloud-based.
Cedar Lodge started off with two screens – one in reception and one in the corridors – but soon decided to expand their digital signage estate because updating existing display boards was taking up a lot of staff time and didn’t necessarily meet the communication needs of all pupils. Plus, pupils across the school were already producing a lot of digital work, so it made sense to put all of this engaging content onto screens instead of making paper displays.
Chris told us,
“Whenever you have that content on 70 inch screens on the wall – the vibrancy, the colour, the changing content, there can be music – it can be so much more than just a flat display board. That then builds the atmosphere within the school.”
Simple content management
Cedar Lodge School now has 15 Apple TVs in place for their digital signage. The benefit of this setup is that they can use the TrilbyTV app directly from Apple TV, so there’s no need to have an iPad or another device connected to the TV. This means that it’s simple to manage what’s displayed in each place from a central location, without any extra hardware or complex setup.
Chris explains,
“It was a really good way of linking in all the screens, connecting them into one interface, controlling them, sending things out in a timely order, and having different schedules. It was those sorts of things that suddenly took away the work of setting up different screens.”
The content is themed based on the location of each screen. For example, there is sports messaging in the PE block and administration messages and information about upcoming events in the reception. The school also re-purposed some computer monitors that were no longer in use and installed them in the fitness block. These screens use the TrilbyTV Web Content Feature to show YouTube videos modelling how to use the machines. This means that students can use them independently without needing a teacher to show them.
When it comes to uploading and managing content, Chris likes to take advantage of the Schedules Feature to stay organised. He told us,
“You can do the work at the start of the year and then forget about it. As the year progresses certain things will pop up, there might be a menu change or something like that. Then it’s quick and easy to update.”
He also finds the Playlists Feature very easy to use because he can visually see the order of content and drag and drop items to move them around, without any complicated settings or editing tools. He likes that the language used throughout TrilbyTV is easily understandable. For example, playlists are something many people are familiar with from music or video apps.
As well as a user-friendly interface, TrilbyTV serves as a simple way to manage content at the school. Because all previous content is easily accessible on the platform, there’s a catalogue of everything the school has created which they can go back and re-use or refresh as they need each year. As well as saving staff time, it provides a bank of evidence of things that have happened in school – from whole school events to individual work – and is an easy way to celebrate and evaluate these achievements.
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Although Cedar Lodge has been using TrilbyTV for almost a decade, they still have big plans for the future. Chris told us, “We’re a school that never sits back and keeps on doing the same thing for the sake of it.” He went on to explain that his future plans for TrilbyTV are focussed on increasing ownership of digital signage throughout the school.
Chris plans to increase the number of screens in the school and allocate each class to a screen. By encouraging students to take more ownership of what’s on display and assigning teachers their own screen for their class he hopes to, “get a new set of eyes and a new set of ears,” on the school’s signage. Involving more of the school community also has the advantage of generating more relevant content for different age groups, because what’s relevant for year 11 isn’t the same as nursery. Chris also explains, “if we can bring staff onboard that in itself future proofs the use of digital signage in the school.” As it means that not only one individual is holding the keys to the system and more staff feel confident in creating and managing signage content.
Chris summarised their experience over the years by saying,
“The fact is that TrilbyTV has been in Cedar Lodge now for around ten years – that says a lot. This is something that’s now part of our day-to-day structure to the school. We make sure that the screens are on in the morning because there are things to show. It’s not just a gimmick or something we do once a term. It’s something that’s very regularly changed on a weekly, if not a daily basis, with new content.”
It was fantastic to hear all about the amazing work at Cedar Lodge and we’re excited to see what the future holds for their digital signage. If you’d like to find out more about how TrilbyTV could improve communication at your school or trust, you can book a free demo with one of our digital signage experts. If you’d like to try it out, you can also sign up for a free, fully functional 30 day trial.