We have another exciting instalment in our Scotland schools blog series. Following our visits to Hamilton College and Bertha Park, we went to see Scott Jewell, Business manager at Perth Grammar School. Scott discussed the importance of impact and why digital signage is key in displaying informative content,
“It’s important to me to get consistent messages across to everyone in the school. Making sure that all of our platforms correspond with messages that are visible on site. This extends to the look of everything, the consistent branding and messaging of our online newsletters that go out, along with the TV screens and even posters that are up at the school. For me, it’s a very important aspect of school life, sometimes I think ‘how do I get that message to all the different people that it needs to get to?’ It can be a challenge, so definitely having consistent messaging is key for me.”
Importance of sharing key messages
“It’s effective for communication, we use it in our social spaces because we have general content rolling during social times, the ‘welcome to school’ and ‘end of day’ messages. All of that content just rolls on the live feed that we have on the screens. We don’t have a school bell, so we have a two stage process in place. The screen says you have five minutes to get to class, to prompt everyone that we are now going to class and then five minutes it goes to, here’s where the study spaces are.”
Getting students involved with digital signage content
Scott then told us about their social media calendar and how digital signage is all planned out alongside other communication tools,
“It’s planned in the sense that it matches our school calendar and events. As a rights respecting school, we try and highlight different national theme days. Our social content falls in line with the calendar and again the digital signage will match that. Quite a lot of the content does come from pupils, we have a pupil Council type of group, it’s a great way to share their voice and they’re coming up with all of those ideas. We have a pupil leadership team, they have theme days which match national days and this falls in line with fundraising.”
“All of the content together in the calendar is planned in a sense but it’s also very current as well. TrilbyTV gives us that flexibility that we can plan it but also have the live element and pull it from our social media feeds. When we post online, it’s very easy for that to then repeat on the screen and there’s no additional work there for us to do.”
Five considerations for digital signage
Download free PDFTrilbyTV eureka moments
“There have been many eureka moments, but I suppose for me the fact that when we turned the screen on and all that content appeared was a moment in itself. The fact it was actually live with current content was groundbreaking, along with the ease of it working and just at a click of a button it was there.”
“When I did the first training session, they said you’ve done everything that we were going to cover in the session and I was like that’s because it was so simple and easy to use. For me, that altogether was a moment of – it’s straightforward, there’s no faffing about, there’s no long 300 page guide to read. It’s just clear and concise. It’s simple and so easy. I love it. My main eureka moment is that it actually works and it’s effortless.”
Scott then told us about key features, how they’re utilising the various tools and resources TrilbyTV has to offer,
“Scheduling is good, that really works for us. But I do really like that there’s content that you can just pull into your feed, like Britannica World facts and Vocabulary Ninja word of the day, that’s effortless for us as a school and it’s really relevant. I’ve learned things from just walking past and going, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that about Malta’. There’s the concept of always learning and no matter where you are in this building, there is learning to be had. That is a really simple way of that happening, all I have to do is add it to the schedule and it’s there for hours across the day.”
Scott also added, “The fact that there’s always new stuff appearing, that’s really good as well because it does make the content relevant. Having content available with science and maths elements is fantastic for us. We have Maths Week Scotland, along with science weeks, it’s good that we can add that in for that week and then automatically set it to come down. All of that just makes it simple for us as a school. I like the idea of the online screen where you can embed a video and the web player feature. We have a weekly communication that goes out to parents which is a great way to show what’s going on behind the school walls to the wider community.”
Why TrilbyTV?
“For us, TrilbyTV gave us a range of options when we needed to add more, so the flexibility of TrilbyTV was good and we had very specific things we wanted to get out of it. Things like scheduling, being able to have different screens doing different things all under the one login umbrella, all of that makes it really, really simple.”
“When we started to use TrilbyTV, everything we wanted and were promised has been delivered. It’s provided everything, the level of support you get, if you ask for assistance on the website, they are very quick to give you a reply and you get that followed up. We’ve had regular check-ins, just to see how that progress is going and it is worth it for us, which is all really good. Having multiple points of contact is helpful for me, because as much as I manage the content, the technical side isn’t my skill point, so being able to have that triangle of communication is helpful.”
Support & guidance
At TrilbyTV we’re always here to help at any stage of your digital signage journey, we love hearing how the support we give as a team makes an impact within your school. Scott told us how TrilbyTV has helped with building whole school communication,
“Our relationship with TrilbyTV is amazing. I really enjoy it, it’s so simple to communicate with everyone, whether that be by phone or email or on the chat function. For us as a school, our journey with digital is happening very rapidly with everyone else. We became a digital school last year so we are very much on that digital journey and looking to see how we can use technology to its absolute potential. We’ve changed learning and teaching in terms of using digital platforms to do that.”
“TrilbyTV was just the next layer of that in terms of we’ve got the teaching sorted ‘How to triangulate communications with our online digital communications with parents and pupils, versus what’s on the calendar and on our website. So how does that all come together?’ Being able to do that, TrilbyTV provided us with areas that maybe hadn’t thought about doing and actually this opened a wider conversation about how to expand that and make it better and it’s definitely user friendly, so you don’t have that aspect to worry about. All of that coming together was really good. I would absolutely recommend TrilbyTV to anyone and have done. TrilbyTV would be our first choice to go to, over another company.”
It was great to catch up with Scott, hearing about the amazing work they have achieved and to see the impact TrilbyTV has had at Perth Grammar school. If you’re interested in seeing how digital signage can make a difference to your school, sign up for a free demo or try TrilbyTV out with a 30 day trial!