Thanks to Extron's versatile NAV Pro AV over IP system and mobile modular furniture, the Caldwell County School System has elevated its humble meeting room into a hub of innovation and collaboration. The school system, located in North Carolina, equipped their boardroom with a modern audiovisual system that shows meeting agendas and presentations on multiple screens around the room for those attending in-person and streams broadcasts of board meetings to viewers attending meetings virtually.
Constantly booked, the venue hosts community forums, teacher in-service training sessions, K-12 classes, and monthly school board meetings. Eight AV-equipped workstations line the walls of the room. The workstations independently originate and display AV content shareable to the other workstations and to the Internet. Each workstation has a unique color ID, signified by the color of the buttons on its touchpanel user interface.
"People from other North Carolina school districts and neighboring states have attended meetings in this room, and they are definitely impressed," said Cody Greene, technology director at Caldwell County School System, who operates and maintains the AV system. "The AV system is rock solid in continuous day-to-day operation, and the only maintenance performed has been planned upgrades and operator interface changes."
Specifically, 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-inch touchscreens. The other six are 98-inch 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-inch displays are used during board meetings and community events to provide easily readable information to crowds or to provide background ambiance or informational images.
To support active learning and other use cases where people collaborate in small groups and also share to neighboring groups in the room, each workstation has its own display, PC, NAV encoder, NAV scaling decoder, and TouchLink Pro touchpanel. ShareLink Pro wireless presentation systems allow wireless sharing from portable devices.
"One reason we selected ShareLink is because a lot of the people who meet and collaborate in this room have Chromebooks," said Patrick Morgan, director, network and video technologies Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute. "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."
Multicolor LED light strips controlled by the AV system backlight the top and bottom of each station display to indicate at a glance which station is originating the content appearing on the screen. The bottom backlight shows the workstation's own color ID, while the top backlight shows the color ID of the workstation supplying the displayed content. The district’s in-house IT/AV team designed, installed, programmed and operates the boardroom AV system.