Extron AV Technology Enhances Community Communications at Caldwell County Schools Boardroom

Caldwell County School System has 11,000 students enrolled in grades Pre-K through 12, making it the largest provider of educational services in North Carolina’s Caldwell County. The school system embraces innovative technologies to offer its diversified student body a broad range of academic studies from fine arts to advanced curricular courses and career/technical certification through virtual and face-to-face settings.

A VERSATILE SPACE FOR MEETINGS, TEACHING, AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

The school board strives to communicate clearly and transparently with all community stakeholders: students, parents, staff, and vendors. To that end, they’ve equipped the boardroom with a modern AV system that displays meeting agendas and presentations on multiple screens for in-person attendees and streams board meetings live to virtual participants.

To make best use of the venue, the furniture and AV system have the flexibility to function not only as a boardroom, but also as a community meeting room, an in-service training room, or a student classroom. The district’s in-house IT/AV team designed and installed the AV system. Patrick Morgan, Director, Network and Video Technologies in the Technology and Information Services department at Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute, designed the AV system. Cody Greene, Technology Director for the Caldwell County School System, installed, maintains, and operates the AV system.

One reason we selected ShareLink is because a lot of the people who meet and collaborate in this room have Chromebooks. We pretested the casting capability of Chromebook with ShareLink, and it worked well. ShareLink also simplifies the AV system design and saves on additional equipment purchases because it has a built-in switcher to transfer between wired and wireless content sharing.

DESIGN SOLUTION

NAV Pro AV over IP — The Key to a Flexible Space

The room has eight AV content origination workstations and eight displays. A NAV® Pro AV over IP 1 Gbps network links all displays to all content origination workstations, allowing any source to be shown on any or all of the displays. NAV encoders and scaling decoders provide ingress and egress to the IP network to switch and transport AV content from the sources to the displays.

Displays are spaced equidistant around the room, two on each wall. Two of the displays are 86" touchscreens. The other six are 98" displays. The touchscreen displays are used in teaching sessions where instructors can interact with the content shown on the screen. They are mounted on opposite walls so that classes can be held at either end of the room. The 98" displays are used during board meetings and community events to provide easily readable information to crowds or to provide background ambiance or informational images.

People from other North Carolina school districts and neighboring states have attended meetings in this room, and they’re definitely impressed. After a statewide school superintendent meeting took place in the room, I received a call from our district’s superintendent informing me that all the visiting superintendents that he spoke with were blown away by how the room’s technology enhanced the meeting experience.

Displays at Each Workstation for Small Group Collaboration

To support active learning and other use cases where people collaborate in individual groups and also share to neighboring groups in the room, each workstation has its own display. Each workstation consists of a PC, a NAV encoder, a NAV scaling decoder, and a 3.5" Wall Mount TouchLink® Pro Touchpanel. The PC and AV equipment are mounted behind the displays. Each workstation includes a wireless keyboard and mouse for use with the PC hidden behind the display. All workstation PCs have Internet access through the school district’s building LAN.

Wired or Wireless AV Program Content

The six workstations with 98" displays include a ShareLink® Pro wireless presentation system. AV program content can come from the workstation PC via wired HDMI or wirelessly from users’ portable devices via the ShareLink Pro. Users can easily select wired or wireless sources using buttons on the TouchLink touchpanel. The two workstations with the 86" touchscreen displays do not include a touchpanel; they can switch between wired or wireless content using capabilities built into the displays themselves.

The AV system seldom requires servicing, except for pre-planned hardware or software upgrades. Which is a good thing, because the boardroom is in constant use. In fact, the only times when Cody and I can get maintenance access to the boardroom AV system are very early in the morning or late at night.

Full-Room AV Control From Primary Workstation

Station 1 is the Primary Station, with full control over the room’s AV functions. Its PC also receives audio from multiple boundary, ceiling, and wireless microphones and video from three PTZ cameras. The PC runs Zoom software for teleconferencing. It also runs OBS Studio software for capturing, compositing, encoding, recording, and streaming sessions taking place in the room to the Internet.

The PCs at all eight workstations connect via USB to their associated NAV encoders, providing the Primary Station with KVM access to control any other station. The Primary Station includes a 10" TouchLink Pro touchpanel displaying an operator interface with administrative control capabilities. From this touchpanel, the Primary Station operator can turn the room’s AV system on and off, route AV content among the eight workstations, grant control privileges to other workstations, and many other AV control functions. The administrative touchpanel has one-touch button functions to make operation intuitive and efficient. An iPad stored in a wall-mounted power dock mirrors the Primary Station touchpanel, providing wireless control of the AV system from anywhere in the room.

Color-Coded LED Backlighting Shows Who is Sharing to Each Display

In a novel and useful approach, AV system designers Patrick Morgan and Cody Greene assigned a unique color code to each workstation so that people could tell at a glance which workstations are sharing AV program material to each of the displays. The button colors at each workstation TouchLink Pro touchpanel denote the workstation’s assigned color. An LED light strip backlights the bottom of the workstation display in the same color.

Another LED light strip backlights the top of each workstation display with the color of the workstation supplying the AV content currently appearing on the display. The color of the top LED light strip is controlled by the infrared (IR) control port of the display’s NAV scaling decoder and is determined by the AV signal routing performed by the NAV Pro AV over IP network. For example, if the “blue” workstation is supplying AV content to it’s own display, backlighting would be blue both above and below the display. If the “blue” workstation display is showing AV content from another workstation, the top backlight shows the color associated with the workstation supplying the content (e.g., red, yellow, green, etc.).

Users Are Comfortable Operating and Maintaining The AV System

Patrick Morgan holds control system certifications from several AV system manufacturers, including ControlScript® and Global Configurator® from Extron. He used Global Configurator with its drag-and-drop simplicity to ensure that future updates to the system could be accomplished by people of any skill level.

As he customarily does with any new AV system, Morgan invited potential users to “test drive” the touchpanel interface. This allowed him to gauge user reactions and thought processes so that he could fine tune the touchpanel graphics and menu structure to be as intuitive as possible. This process pays dividends, because users learn how to operate the AV system in minutes.

RESULTS

According to Patrick Morgan, he specified Extron equipment as the backbone of the boardroom’s AV system due to ease of programming and because of Extron’s outstanding technical support. Morgan’s role designing and programming the boardroom AV system was in addition to his position at Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute. Since commissioning of the boardroom, Morgan has supported Cody Greene and the Caldwell County Schools IT team during several AV system upgrades that expanded the system from four to eight screens. More expansion is planned to create an overflow room. Morgan continues to provide remote support over the district’s network and also assists on-site as needed.

Cody Greene says that the AV system is rock solid in continuous day-to-day operation. Greene says that the only times that AV system maintenance is needed are when infrequent planned upgrades or operator interface changes are implemented. He’s very happy with the AV system’s performance and reliability. And users have shown their approval by keeping the boardroom constantly booked.

CALDWELL COUNTY SCHOOLS VIDEO LINKS

Click here to browse and view videos of school board meetings streamed from the boardroom AV system via OBS Studio to the Caldwell County Schools YouTube channel.

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