Downeast Maine high school removes classroom disruptions from frequent PA announcements with Carousel Cloud, while building a stronger sense of school community amongst students, staff and parents

MINNEAPOLIS, August 31, 2021 – Carousel Digital Signage continues to build its K-12 education customer base with a Carousel Cloud deployment at Mount Desert Island High School in Bar Harbor, Maine. The Carousel Cloud network reliably delivers digital signage content to 63 displays, covering all classrooms and several common areas.

The installation marks a first for Mount Desert High School, which relied exclusively on e-mail and public address audio to keep staff and students informed. This became increasingly challenging at the start of the 2020-21 school year as in-person classes resumed following a period of pure remote learning due to COVID-19-related lockdowns. With staff and student safety a priority, the number of announcements quickly increased; classes were often interrupted for updates on social distancing and release schedules.

The shift to digital signage in early 2021 now provides everyone inside the school with immediate access to information that often changes quickly, while also fostering a stronger sense of community and school spirit.

“There is an increased feeling of celebration in our school since transitioning to digital signage,” said Mark Arnold, Educational Technology Director, Mount Desert Island High School. “Our PA system was older and complicated to use, and we wanted to relieve teachers and students from intrusive audio announcements that disrupted the learning environment. We reached a point where announcements were often happening in four-minute intervals, and digital signage was our best path forward.”

Mount Desert Island had been working with Jamf, a mobile device management company focused on the Apple experience, for several years. A Carousel Digital Signage partner, Jamf recommended that Arnold use Carousel Cloud as a lightweight, IT-friendly platform to deliver digital signage content to Apple TV devices. Jamf specializes in converting Apple TV devices to digital signage players, and Carousel Digital Signage offers a native iOS app for playing out digital signage content. Mount Desert Island High School also happened to have televisions and Apple TV devices within their classrooms for educational purposes.

“We added televisions inside classrooms over the past five years, and we tested some free alternatives for playing video messages on these screens from hard-wired computers,” said Arnold. “We really needed a system though that offered a professional content management workflow, design templates and a comfortable user interface that would reduce my creative responsibilities. It was important for other users to develop and manage content with ease. Carousel Cloud allows staff inside the main office, principal’s office and guidance office to create and contribute high-quality content instead of running it through me to manage. These are the people that really offer the most important information to our entire school population, and Carousel Cloud makes it very efficient for users of any skill level.”

The point about the entire school population is of interest to Arnold. He has recognized a clear difference in how students respond to information, and that positivity has extended to parents and the broader community as the same digital signage content, which includes a mix of video, graphics and text, is shared on social media channels.

“it’s a difficult connection to make between where students ingest their information versus parents and community members,” said Arnold. “Emails often go unread, and a small percentage regularly visit our website. The ability to reach out students directly with important messages during school hours and then share that same content on social media means that we are now consistently reaching a much broader population. Students are also sharing what they see on the screens with their parents. The reception to what we are doing with digital signage has been very positive.”