The Glasgow Academy – Digital signage making a visual impact

Continuing with our Scotland schools blog series, we visited The Glasgow Academy to see how using TrilbyTV on their digital signage has made a difference around their school. We met with IT Manager, Stephen Fowkes, who told us about what initially enticed them to TrilbyTV,

“It came at the right time for us, we were looking at extending our signage, on another solution system. We were told that it could be like five, six months before the school got hold of any of the newer systems and I was like, ‘what do I do?’ Then I spotted TrilbyTV on one of the ANME forums and it looked quite interesting.”

Setting up TrilbyTV

“We started off with a free trial. We ran it for a month, which then coincided with me contacting Neil from TrilbyTV, just to see what he recommended as the best devices for our school to run it on. We then contacted VeryPC for Android devices, as all our systems run off of them and all of the devices are independent. We then got them all up and working and made sure they were as secure as possible. It was great, we didn’t have any problems setting up. We set up TrilbyTV in the school holidays so we had lots of areas that were getting done up and decorated.”

Being creative with content

Stephen told us how TrilbyTV helped to make a visual impact around the school,

“The differences compared to the old system are that it’s more of a visual thing, so it’s much more noticeable. TrilbyTV encourages you to use content that covers the full screen rather than segmented, we used to have the ticker tape along the bottom of the window with the presentation running and then you had an RSS feed. So it was good to just build it all into the one unit. One of the things that I really liked was not just the social media feeds but specifically the BBC Scotland weather. Every time they publish a post it actually comes with their video report, so it actually comes up playing the report too.”

TrilbyTV Features

Digital signage can create a sense of unity, playing a key role in making it simple to communicate within your school. Stephen told us more about using TrilbyTV’s announcement feature and how it’s great for building whole school communication,

“A great feature is the announcements feature, being able to use it to change all the screens at once when we needed to get an announcement out across the whole school was really good. The announcement was up within minutes, I contacted our external relations department to see if they wanted me to put anything up on the screens. They said yes and they sent me the JPEG with the image, I did a couple of changes and put our crest next to it and just uploaded it. I find PowerPoint is also really good with creating the slides, it’s really handy and there’s no faffing about or making individual changes for each one.”

Stephen summed up the Glasgow Academy’s experience with TrilbyTV by saying,
“The overall experience of using TrilbyTV so far has been really good, it’s been very positive. Anybody that’s seen it, we’ve had positive feedback from them.” It was great to catch up with Stephen and to see the impact TrilbyTV has had at The Glasgow Academy so far. If you’re interested in seeing how TrilbyTV can make a difference to your school digital signage, sign up for a free demo or try it out for yourself with a 30 day trial!