Extron Improves Communications in Caldwell Schools

The boardroom at this North Carolina school has eight workstations creating AV content and eight video monitors. 86 y 98 inches of Extron. A professional AV NAV over IP 1 Gbps connects them to workstations that create content.

El Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute (CCC&OF) has 11.000 students enrolled in courses from preschool to high school, making it the largest provider of educational services in this area of North Carolina.

The school management sought to communicate transparently with all community stakeholders: students, parents, staff and suppliers. For this they have equipped the meeting room with a system OFF modern displaying meeting agendas and presentations on multiple screens to in-person attendees, and live stream board meetings to virtual participants.

To make the best use of space, the furniture and AV system have the flexibility to function not only as a meeting room, but also as a meeting room, a training room or a student classroom.

In-house IT/AV team designed and installed the AV system. Patrick Morgan, Director of Video and Network Technologies at CCC&OF, he did it. Cody Greene, Caldwell County School System Director of Technology, installed, maintains and operates the AV system.

“One of the reasons we selected ShareLink is because many of the people meeting and collaborating in this room have Chromebooks. We tested the broadcasting capacity of Chromebook with ShareLink, and it worked well. ShareLink also simplifies AV system design and saves on additional equipment purchases, as it has a built-in switch to transfer between wired and wireless shared content”, explains Patrick Morgan, director of video and network technologies at Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute (CCC&OF).

The key to a flexible space

The room has eight workstations that create AV content and eight monitors. And Professional AV NAV over IP of 1 Gbps connects all monitors to all workstations creating content, allowing any source to be displayed on one or all monitors.

Los NAV scaler encoders and decoders Provide input and output to the IP network to switch and transport AV content from sources to monitors.

The monitors are placed at the same distance around the room, two on each wall. Two of the monitors are touch screens 86 inches. The other six monitors are 98 inches.

Los touch screen monitors are used in teaching sessions where instructors can interact with the content displayed on the screen. They are mounted on opposite walls so that classes can be held at either end of the room.

The monitors 98 inches are used during management meetings and community events to provide easily readable information to the public or to provide background ambience or informative images.

Small collaboration groups

To support the active learning and other uses in which participants collaborate in individual groups and also share with neighboring groups in the room, each workstation has its own monitor.

Each station is made up of a computer, a NAV encoder, a NAV scaler decoder and a TouchLink Pro 3.5 touchscreen″ wall mount.

The computer and AV equipment are mounted behind the monitors. Each workstation includes a wireless keyboard and mouse for use with the computer hidden behind the monitor. All the computers in the workstations have Internet access through the school district building's LAN.

The six workstations with monitors 98 inches include a ShareLink Pro wireless presentation system. AV program content can come from the workstation computer via HDMI cable or wirelessly from users' mobile devices via ShareLink Pro.

Users can select wired or wireless sources using the TouchLink touchscreen buttons.

The two workstations with touch screen monitors 86 inches do not include a touch panel. They can switch between wired and wireless content using features built into the monitors themselves.

“AV system rarely requires maintenance, except for previously planned hardware or software upgrades. Which is a good thing, since the meeting room is in constant use”, says Patrick Morgan, director of video and network technologies at Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute (CCC&OF).

AV control from the hall

The station 1 It is the main station, with complete control over room AV functions. Your computer also receives audio from multiple boundary microphones, ceiling and wireless and video from three PTZ cameras. The computer has Zoom software for teleconferencing. It also has OBS Studio software to capture, compose, encode, record and stream sessions that take place in the room to the Internet.

The eight workstation computers connect via USB to their associated NAV encoders, providing the main station acceso KVM to control any other station.

The main station includes a TouchLink Pro touchscreen 10 inches displaying an operator interface with administrative control functions. From this touch screen, the main station operator can turn the room's AV system on and off, route AV content between all eight workstations, grant control privileges to other stations and many other AV control functions.

Administrative touch screen has one-touch button functions to make operation intuitive and efficient. An iPad stored in a power dock duplicates the touch screen of the main station, providing wireless control of the AV system from any room.

Led backlight

In a novel and useful approach, AV system designers Patrick Morgan and Cody Greene color-coded each workstation so participants could tell at a glance which workstations were sharing AV program material with each monitor.. Button colors on each TouchLink Pro workstation touchscreen indicate the color assigned to the station. A LED light strip backlight the bottom of the workstation monitor in the same color.

Another LED light strip backlights the top of each workstation monitor with the workstation's color providing the AV content currently appearing on the monitor..

The color of the top Led light strip is controlled by the infrared control port (AND) from the monitor's NAV scaler decoder and is determined by the AV signal routing performed by the Professional AV NAV over IP.

Patrick Morgan has control system certifications from different AV system manufacturers, including ControlScript y Global Configurator by Extron. He used Global Configurator with its drag-and-drop simplicity to ensure that future updates to the system could be carried out by any user..

According to Patrick Morgan, He specified Extron equipment as a core part of the boardroom AV system because of the ease of programming and technical support from Extron..

Morgan's boardroom AV system design and programming role was an extra assignment to his position at Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute. Since the launch of the boardroom, Morgan has assisted Cody Greene and the Caldwell County Schools IT team on several AV system upgrades that expanded the system from four to eight screens.. Further expansion is planned to create an additional room. Morgan continues to provide remote support through the district network and also assists onsite when necessary.