FEATURE
MAKING AN IMPACT IN EDUCATION
Education-based FMs are navigating a period of intense digital transformation. Here, Toni Chalk, Managing Director of Strive AV, explores how integrated AV can enable a smooth transition.
The wave of a new era As an integrator, we’re often the link between education providers and technology manufacturers. This puts us in an ideal position to understand the current and future AV requirements of the education sector, and the technologies being developed to meet these demands.
The pandemic aka ‘the biggest experiment into distance- learning the world has ever seen’, rapidly accelerated the adoption of new technologies in this sector. Tech became the only effective solution for enabling remote learning and managing the unique challenges of social distancing.
We’re also in the era of schooling a new generation of ‘digital natives’; children and young adults who are extremely familiar with interactive and immersive technologies, touch screen interfaces, and digital communication since birth.
With evolving expectations from students and teachers alike, coupled with the fast pace of digital transformation, the classroom is progressing into a hub of connected technologies. The traditional blackboard is a relic of the past – today it’s all about interactive, engaging displays, high-quality AV and collaboration tools.
The smart classroom At Strive AV, we’ve seen a huge uplift in the deployment
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of interactive displays into education. This hardware is now a key component of every modern classroom from primary school to higher education. The purpose of interactive displays is to encourage collaboration, with digital whiteboarding and video conferencing for example, making them a great choice for active learning.
For facilities managers, interactive displays offer a wealth of additional benefits. At Strive AV, we partner with brands that offer 4k interactive displays - BenQ, Clevertouch, Promethean and SMART - with features such as an on-board USB peripheral switch, the latest spec inbuilt Android operating system or optional Windows PC, and a remote management platform.
The remote management allows a helpdesk agent or field technician to broker a virtual session with the display from anywhere in the world, install software and apply policy to one or all screens. The displays update their firmware over the cloud and come out of the box with an excellent system security, as well as ‘air-gap’ network connections to prevent unauthorised access to the network.
Some interactive display technologies have also taken AV signal transmission into the realm of the IT network. Software Defined Video over Ethernet (SDVoE) is the practice of treating an educational facility as a matrix of sources and destinations, where any classroom can
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