The entrance hall screens: how a school communicates internally

A lot of school information is only useful for a few days

Not every piece of a school's communication needs to become a letter home. Some information simply has to be visible at the right moment.

It might be a temporary change of entrance because of building work, an activity planned for Friday, that day's menu, a staff meeting, assessment dates, a sports result or recognition of a group of students for a project. These are different pieces of information, aimed at different audiences and with one feature in common: they quickly stop being useful.

Digital signage is particularly well suited to this kind of content because it allows it to be published when it is needed and removed automatically when it no longer is. This stops the noticeboard from filling up with old notices, or a screen from spending weeks announcing an activity that has already taken place.

It also helps to get more out of everything that goes on in the school. There are projects, awards, activities, competitions and students' work that are part of school life and often get hardly any visibility outside the classroom where they took place. A well-used screen can also become a simple way of showing that activity to the whole school community.

Not every screen should show the same thing

One of the most common mistakes is to install several screens and play exactly the same content on all of them. It simplifies management, but wastes much of what a digital signage system makes possible.

Each location has a different audience. Waiting in the entrance hall are families, suppliers and people who may be visiting the school for the first time. That is the place for opening hours, open days, admissions deadlines, information about the school's educational approach or its most notable activities.

A screen in a staff room has a different purpose. It can show meetings, cover arrangements, planned activities, internal reminders or important dates in the calendar. One placed in an area used by particular year groups can show information aimed specifically at those students.

Even a single screen can serve different purposes depending on the time of day. In the entrance hall, it can show certain information while students are arriving and something different in the afternoon, when most of those passing through are families coming to collect their children or for after-school activities. That is why the project should begin by looking at who passes through each space and what information they need, before deciding how many screens to install.

Content has to change for the screen to stay useful

A screen that keeps exactly the same content for weeks ends up losing much of its ability to catch the eye. People who walk past it every day quickly learn that there is no new information there and stop looking at it.

This means that the quality of the project does not depend only on the size of the screens or their resolution. A simpler screen with useful, up-to-date information can do far more for the school than an impressive model that shows the same presentation for months.

The important question, then, is not just which screen to buy. You have to decide who is going to publish the content and how often.

Technology can make that job much easier. Recurring content can be prepared in advance and one-off announcements can be scheduled with a start date and an end date. That way, a notice appears when it should and disappears automatically when it is no longer useful. It also lightens one of the least visible tasks in signage: remembering to take down whatever has expired.

Whoever produces the information should be able to publish it

In many schools there is an understandable tendency: anything with a cable, a screen or a connection ends up falling to the IT lead. With digital signage, that is not always a good idea.

The IT department can make sure the infrastructure works, but it is not usually the one that produces the information. The school office knows its own hours and notices, school leadership knows which institutional communications it wants to display, the sports department manages its results and the chaplaincy team knows its calendar of activities.

If all those people first have to send the content to the IT lead for them to publish it, an extra step is added that ends up slowing the system down. When, on top of that, a date has to be changed, some text corrected or an announcement removed, the process starts all over again.

That is why a signage solution for education should be usable without technical knowledge and directly from a browser. Anyone with permission to manage particular content should be able to publish and schedule it without installing special applications or relying on the IT department every time. That does not mean everyone can change any screen. Quite the opposite: the system must make it possible to organise who manages the screens at each school or site and to maintain a common approach to communication.

There are times in the school year when screens make even more sense

Although digital signage is used all year round, there are certain dates when its usefulness becomes especially visible. An open day is a good example. For a few hours, the school is visited by many families who do not know the building and are weighing up where to send their children. While they wait, they can find out about the school's projects, activities carried out during the year, its facilities or directions for the tour route.

Something similar happens during admissions. Deadlines, the documents required, opening hours or certain instructions can change over those weeks, and a screen makes it possible to keep that information up to date without constantly replacing sheets of paper at the entrance.

Graduations, festivals, celebrations and end-of-year events offer another opportunity. The same screens that display notices during the year can show photographs, videos, timings or the programme for the event. And since many of those dates are known months in advance, the content can be left ready and scheduled to appear automatically at the right time.

Where a screen goes matters as much as the screen itself

Before installing anything, the first step is to walk round the school and watch where people actually stop. The most attractive location is not always the most effective. A screen intended for families should go where there is time to look at it: a reception area, a waiting area or a spot where people pass slowly. You also have to take into account the height, the distance from which it will be read and the lighting in the space. A large window directly opposite can make a screen hard to read even if, technically, it has good specifications.

Then there is the infrastructure. Each location needs a power supply and a network connection. Sometimes the ideal spot for the screen is precisely the one where there is neither, which may mean cabling or minor building work that is best planned for from the outset.

The screens the school already has are also worth reviewing. A digital signage project does not necessarily mean automatically replacing every existing TV or monitor. If some equipment can be reused, the sensible thing is to integrate it and focus the investment only where it is needed.

The screen should keep working even if there is an issue with the internet

A signage screen should not go black simply because the internet connection has been lost for a few minutes. A well-designed solution can download the content in advance to the device attached to each screen and play it locally. That way, if there is a connectivity issue, the content that was already scheduled carries on being shown.

This is especially important in places that families can see. A screen in reception or in the entrance hall is part of the image the school projects, and it should not be permanently dependent on a connection to a remote server to show a presentation that was already scheduled.

It is equally useful to be able to find out centrally whether a screen has stopped working. In a school with several floors or buildings, it makes no sense to rely on someone happening to walk past and discovering that one of the screens has been off for two days. The platform should make it possible to check the status of the various points from a single place.

Scheduling is what makes several screens genuinely useful

When a school has several locations, the value of the system lies in being able to decide what appears in each one and when. The same content can be published on every screen when it is a general notice, but it should also be possible to show different information by building, floor or area. And that selection can be combined with dates and times.

For example, an activity can be announced during the week before and disappear automatically once it has taken place. A screen can show internal information at certain times and switch in the afternoon to content aimed at families. That degree of automation makes it possible to keep the signage fresh without forcing anyone to keep a constant eye on it.

PenwinTV: digital signage designed for schools and colleges

PenwinTV is the digital signage solution that we at PenwinEdu deploy in schools and colleges, as well as in other settings such as parishes and communities. Publishing is done from the browser and lets you organise content by screen, dates and time slots.

Content is played locally, so the screens can keep showing what they already have scheduled even if the internet connection is temporarily lost. This allows the signage to be used as a stable service and not as a mere web page left permanently open on a TV. The same dashboard shows, in real time, the status of each screen and the issues it logs, so one that has stopped working is spotted without anyone having to walk past it.

But, as with many of the solutions we implement in education, the tool is just one part of the project. First you have to understand what the school wants to communicate, who the audience is in each space and who will be in charge of maintaining that information. Then you decide where screens are needed, which of the existing ones can be put to use and what infrastructure each point needs.

A screen makes sense when it communicates something worth looking at

Digital signage should not be approached as a more modern way of replacing a noticeboard. Its real value emerges when it allows the school's everyday information to reach the right place at the right time. That means a family waiting in reception can find out about a school activity, teachers can quickly find an internal notice, students can see the results of a competition or an open day can show everything that is normally scattered across leaflets and posters.