TFA keeps students informed with campus-wide Carousel network
Published: WORSHIP
WORLD: The First Academy (TFA), a private Christian school based in Orlando, Florida, has been outfitted with a Carousel digital signage network from Tightrope Media Systems. The system is used to keep the college’s 1,200 students informed and up-to-date with the day’s activities through the display of video, pictures, text, tickers, social posts and weather graphics.
‘Our goal was to engage students with timely, captivating content that would keep them informed about important school events while still celebrating the achievements of our students and teachers,’ said Matt Eggert, M.S., director of technology and innovation for The First Academy. ‘We also wanted our signage system to be easy to use and update on the fly, with displays reinforcing our school brand identity. Carousel does everything we need as part of its automated workflow.’
The system provides content to eight 55- to-65-inch displays strategically positioned across the campus, with each one divided into zones dedicated to the different school divisions – the Upper School (high school), Middle School and Lower School (K-6), athletics facility, media centre, library, theatre and school store. The divisions can create their own custom content that is ‘automatically delivered to a zone on their display’, while content relevant to all students is delivered to all the displays at once.
The college has also been impressed with the scalability of the signage network, which supports up to 300 players should it wish to expand in the future. ‘The network quickly scaled after the Upper School went live with the initial Carousel media players,’ added Mr Eggert. ‘It’s a cinch to connect new players to Carousel’s virtualised backbone. It didn’t take long before others across the campus wanted their own displays, so we expanded the system to support other departments very quickly. However, while Carousel has a wide array of built-in design tools, we turned to Tightrope’s professional design team to help design our templates. Over a conference call with Tightrope’s design team, we discussed how to apply our website’s look, colours and fonts to our Carousel displays, which Tightrope considered in the creation of our custom templates.’