Chief Leschi Schools are operated as a Tribal Compact school by the Puyallup Tribe of Indians near Puget Sound, Washington, under rules that allow the tribe to structure its own schooling. Chief Leschi Schools, named for the famous 19th century Nisqually chief, have all K-12 on the same campus, and age groups share hallways and campus facilities. The school explicitly values strong community partnerships and sees its work rooted in the life of the wider community.
Rise Vision in the Hallways of a K-12 Campus
When Chief Leschi students walk the halls, they see 17 eye-catching digital signs to keep them updated. The digital signage is concentrated in public areas and key locations like the school nurse’s office and the offices of some staff members.
In the past, static, locally-controlled digital signage relied on Smart TVs and some more up-to-date smartboards.
Now, those screens are all integrated into a Rise Vision implementation, centrally controlled by the school’s Director of Information Technology, David Bonds and powered by Intel NUCs.
After receiving new displays and seeing the advantages of expanding its use of Rise Vision, the school also recently moved to Rise Vision's unlimited license.
News and Announcements
The most effective use to which Leschi Schools put their Rise Vision signage is keeping students up to date with school life — and, in keeping with the school’s community commitments, with life outside the school too.
Much of this is achieved by scheduling through Rise Vision and embedding the school’s Twitter feed in its signs. This is quick and easy to do in Rise Vision, saving the school’s five-person media team significant time each week.
Students’ response has been overwhelmingly positive, and one of the most common requests the media team receives from staff is to add more items to the Rise Vision schedule.
Snapshots of Life
One of Chief Leschi Schools’ biggest successes with their Rise Vision implementation is that students use it continuously. It’s common, says Tom Mearns, Chief Leschi Schools’ Network Analyst. Students remark, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that event was going on,’ such as when the school publicized the Daffodil Festival or Hispanic Heritage Month. But they also say, ‘I didn’t know that news story was a thing.’ Through the school’s Rise Vision signage, and often using the school’s Twitter feed embedded in a relevant template, the school can publicize news stories that students might not otherwise be exposed to.
On a more prosaic note, students often take out their phones in corridors to photograph Rise Vision signage showing upcoming events or school schedules: a simple and efficient way to transmit crucial information that helps keep the whole school on track.
Cost/Benefit: For Us, It Has to Pay Right Away
When Chief Leschi Schools came to choose a digital signage solution, the cost was a significant factor. The school wanted a tool that would integrate with the hardware they were already using, allowing them to build a digital signage system in stages as it became possible within budgetary, time and organizational constraints, rather than a selection involving major upfront costs and disruption.
School management, in particular, is already busy and needs a solution that delivers benefits immediately; the lengthy assessment process that precedes most education purchases, and the sometimes-equally lengthy adoption process that can follow it, were not options in these circumstances.
The other major decisive factor was the ease of use, day-to-day. Rise Vision is easy to set up and deploy and requires minimal maintenance. The learning curve is small, and once set up, adding content is very simple and fast. (That’s good because teachers consistently ask for more content to be added to the schedule!)
The Next Step: Rise Vision Everywhere Else
Currently, Chief Leschi doesn’t have Rise Vision implemented in classrooms, but after trialling the product in the school’s public spaces and meeting with an enthusiastic response from teachers and students alike, that’s the next step.
Moving digital signage into classrooms is a priority, but it will require the school to integrate its in-class digital display tools with Rise Vision; fortunately, this is essentially a plug-and-play process that won’t need much of a learning curve.
The school is also working to resolve some of its streaming issues; because of its unique community role, the school hosts, reports on or takes part in many cultural events, and it’s one of the management’s aims to display these to students via digital signage. The plan is to stream some cultural events to classrooms through Rise Vision as part of the school’s broad teaching curriculum.
About Tom:
I am a Network Analyst with Chief Leschi Schools and have been for a year. I work with a team of two other individuals to manage our digital signage content and devices. I’m a US Army veteran with two decades’ experience in Helpdesk Administration and Project Management, and I have now been working in the IT field for 21 years. My role at Chief Leschi Schools gives me the opportunity to enable students’ learning by providing them with a world-class administrative network and excellent technology support system. As our technologies evolve, I am happy to configure and enable those students’ devices to help them further their education and familiarization with computers and other devices. In my spare time, I enjoy traveling with my family.
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Interested in seeing how other schools have used Rise Vision to inspire students? Here are a few more stories to check out:
- Bootstrapping a Dream Financial Literacy Lab (Montgomery Area School District)
- Small City School Lives Big with Digital Signage (Blue Earth Area School)
- Digital Signage That Inspires and Informs Students (Lincoln Christian School)
