Digital signage is something that teachers or school admins should update, right? Well, maybe not. Students are the most influenced by digital signage so it makes sense that they play a role in creating engaging content. Not only does it get students involved, but it can create a valuable STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) project.
How do you use digital signage to create a STEM project? This post will show you how.
1. Lesson Plan Around What You Are Teaching
You don’t have to create a new program for digital signage; you can design around what you are currently teaching.
Are you a history teacher covering World War II? Students can create content that highlights facts about the war.
Once the facts are collected, put the students in teams and create presentations that appear on displays before holidays like Veterans Day and Memorial Day.
Rise Vision has a number of templates that fit well with facts. You can see two examples below. By updating text and images on these templates with your school's branding and text, you will get eye-catching results in minutes!
Rise Vision also has a number of templates for quotes (see below); the same exercise for facts could also be applied to quotes.
2. Copyright Matters
Many students assume that if an image is on the Internet, it’s free to use. Many teachers assume that if the image is used for education, it’s fair use. This is not always the case!
In addition to creating digital signage for digital displays, it can also be an excellent way to teach students how to use and cite work correctly.
LifeHacker has an excellent chart that you can download and share to help students navigate around what’s legal and what’s not.
To protect your digital signage from possible infringement violations, websites like Pexels host thousands of public domain images.
You can see other places you can get free images for digital signage here.
3. Guide, Don’t Explain
A STEM project should be designed to let students work through a problem and a solution. You should help guide their success but students will learn more when you let them fail and figure out how to troubleshoot problems.
Students using Rise Vision can reach out to our support team to tackle any problems, or they can research solutions in our Help Center article database.
4. What Is a Successful STEM Project?
Have a clear measure of success before starting any STEM project for digital signage. What STEM principles (science, technology, engineering, and math) will you apply.
Your students would use the technology principle to create digital signage; if your school is also using STEAM, arts would apply as well.
If you want more engaging digital signage, using Rise Vision’s HTML widget lets you teach computer science. Depending on the lesson involved, this could fit into any STEM principle.
In the below example, a school used HTML to create a countdown clock for their digital signage so students would know when the next school period would begin.
.png?width=600&name=HTML%20Countdown%20-Williston%20District%20%231%20Schools%20(WHS_Period_1_%20Fullscreen).png "HTML Countdown clock")
5. Test and Evaluate
Before students create any digital signage, have them present it to the rest of the class.
During these presentations, they can share what they were trying to accomplish with their design, the challenges they overcame, and what they learned.
Encourage other students to ask questions about their process and vote for the best presentation.
More Learning Activities Using Rise Vision
For more STEM activities to incorporate with digital signage, check out some of the articles below:
- Bitcoin in Your Classroom
- How Schools Can Use Raspberry Pi for Digital Signage
- How-to-Use Your Display as a Trivia Game
- 50+ Ways Schools Can Use Digital Signage
