We recently visited Thistley Hough Academy in Stoke-on-Trent, a Creative Education Trust Academy. We met with Daniel Shillito, Regional ICT Manager at Harpfield, Hart School and Thistley Hough and Thomas Kent the IT Technician for the Thistley site. Dan began by telling us how much of an impact digital signage has,
“When you go to the train station, a bus station or to an airport, you don’t get three or four different things going on, on the screen. You’ve only got somebody’s attention for 10 seconds, you need to create an impact fast and then they’ve moved on.”
Impactful full screen content
Creating an impact on your school digital displays can be achieved with full screen engaging content, your own school branded visuals or you can include a mixture of educational resources to display from our Content Catalogue. Dan continued with why TrilbyTV was the right fit,
“We love TrilbyTV’s full screen approach, also the fact that TrilbyTV is very much built for the education market at this level, made it perfect. The ready to go educational content is fantastic, we were using the screens straightaway. Dragging biology facts, history facts onto the feed, that’s what we did initially and then as time went on, the content has built up.”
Dan told us about how easy it is to add more schools onto TrilbyTV as more of the trust gets involved,
“For us at a trust level, the MAT management is solid. If you need three schools, you’ve got three schools, if you need all of the trust, you have the whole trust and if you only want one school, it’s possible. We’re at 11 schools now and a twelfth school wants to join.”
Digital signage growth across the schools
“It’s also great to not have to worry about the number of screens, previous solutions had been quite cost prohibitive. For example, if the Head wants to put 10 more screens up in the corridor, then I don’t have to worry about the signage licensing because of the unlimited screen licence.”
Guide to effective digital signage in education
Request free guideDan continued,
“Once we installed TrilbyTV, everyone was really happy with it. We’ve got a number of staff in the trust working across multiple sites. So just being able to dip into different schools is seamless. Equally the people that only need access at a given school, have only got that school.”
Dan also loves that staff in different departments can create their own content, which was too complicated with other platforms,
“We’ve got some staff from English that have been crafting some content on there. It’s actually taken a little bit of work away from the IT Department but we’ve still got the approval process, we can still review content before it goes live.”
Tom then discussed how the simplicity of the Smart Content within TrilbyTV makes it easy to add personalised content,
“It’s great to have pre-made templates for you to just add your own branding. The staff boards are great, it’s an easy win having a slide just saying ‘meet our safeguarding team or leadership team’, we can drag a few photos and titles in and it’s up on the screens straightaway.”
Dan expanded on this further,
“Adding a clock is a good way to help with the school’s time management and students getting to lessons on time. TrilbyTV is also great for adding specific content for individual schools, a particular school in the trust has a confidential reporting mechanism. So if you’re concerned about yourself or concerned about somebody else – the tagline was to whisper it, so we were able to promote that everywhere. When things do have to change, if it’s open evening it’s not an onerous task. Just jump on, change the schedule, drop down and in real time, it’s up there.”
Finally Tom told us about the simplicity of using TrilbyTV and how helpful the features and integrations are,
“Instagram is great, our school is very social media focused right now. When I put stuff on social media it appears on the screens, looks nice, it’s modern and everything looks stylised. You can get your screens looking good within a short space of time and you can showcase some really good content.”
“It’s nice to not be tied to any specific piece of hardware. TrilbyTV is a lot nicer and simpler, the former solution in place was very boxy and confusing. We also spent a lot of time faffing about creating a screen with blocks, spending hour’s working on which bits of the screen, which now we don’t have to do.”
It was great to catch up with Dan and Tom to see the impact TrilbyTV has had at Thistley Hough 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.