More Tools, More Tickets: Why Consolidation Shrinks the IT Queue

Ask a school IT team where its support or IT tickets come from and the same issues come up. A screen sharing cable has stopped working. A dongle has gone missing. A guest cannot connect to the display. A teacher wants students to present their work but nobody is sure how to get them connected. The digital signage screen in the hallway has not updated.

Individually, these sound like minor technical issues. But when the same problems crop up across dozens of classrooms and multiple school buildings, they take up a significant amount of time.

The problem isn’t always the hardware or the people using it. Often, it’s the number of separate tools involved in running the school’s displays. Screen sharing, digital signage and communications may each have their own systems, settings and ways of working. For IT, that means more to manage. For teachers, it means more to learn and more opportunities for things to go wrong.

Every tool adds three kinds of work

Each tool running across a school’s displays brings its own administration console, configuration settings, update requirements, troubleshooting process and licence costs. Each may have its own budget, renewal date and supplier to manage, making it harder to keep track of total spend across the school’s technology estate.

The complexity grows as schools add buildings, upgrade displays or introduce new devices. Settings can differ between rooms, updates need to be managed across multiple systems, and IT has to work out which tool is responsible when something goes wrong. Meanwhile, technology budgets are spread across separate products that may overlap in what they do.

There is also the everyday burden on teachers. If screen sharing works differently from room to room, or digital signage needs a separate process from classroom communications, staff have more to remember and less time to focus on teaching.

Consolidating these functions onto one platform can help simplify both technology management and spending. Instead of paying for and managing separate tools for different jobs, schools can bring screen sharing, digital signage and communications together through Vivi.

Tools built for meeting rooms create classroom tickets

Many screen sharing tools were designed around one person presenting to an audience. Classrooms are different.

Classrooms are different. Teachers move between classrooms, change content throughout a lesson, and need students to share their work. Different teachers, students and visitors also bring a mix of devices, all of which need to connect quickly and easily.

When the technology doesn’t fit the way a classroom operates, teachers find workarounds. They keep cables and dongles nearby, ask students to connect through the teacher’s laptop or contact IT when a guest can’t get connected. Each workaround adds friction to a lesson and can create another support request.

Randolph Township Schools experienced this with the dedicated AV systems previously used in its classrooms.

“Prior to Vivi it was an Extron system, a Crestron system, some multi-thousand dollar AV solution, which still had buttons on the wall and was very difficult for a teacher, even a technical person, to get behind that. Whereas Vivi was very point and click.”

Randolph Township Schools brought screen sharing, digital signage and communications together on Vivi across six buildings. Rather than relying on separate systems for different functions, the district could manage these capabilities through one platform.

For teachers, that means a more consistent experience from room to room. The process for connecting doesn’t need to change depending on the device or classroom.

“When you see the Vivi splash screen and the four-digit code, people know exactly what to do. I open Vivi, I connect. That’s it.”

That consistency extends across Macs, Chromebooks and PCs, reducing the need for different connection methods and making it easier for guests and substitute teachers to present.

Consolidation also makes more possible in the classroom. Teachers can give students permission to share their screens while retaining control of the lesson, making it easier to bring student work into discussions without adding another tool or complicated process.

For IT, bringing these capabilities together means less need to switch between separate systems for everyday management. Firmware updates, settings and support can be handled through Vivi’s central management environment.

The result at Randolph Township Schools has been broad adoption with minimal demand for technical support, according to Director of Technology Peter Emmel:

“From my team and PE teachers all the way up to my Board of Education, everyone is using Vivi with very minimal need for tech support, if any.”

All customer quotes: Peter Emmel, Director of Technology, Randolph Township Schools.

Five signs the stack is creating tickets

A fragmented technology setup isn’t always obvious. These five signs can help you identify where separate tools may be adding unnecessary complexity.

1. Teachers keep cables or dongles at the front of the room as a backup when wireless screen sharing doesn’t work as expected.
2. Guests and substitute teachers need IT support to connect to classroom displays.
3. Student screen sharing is difficult to manage, or students have to rely on the teacher’s laptop to present.
4. Hallway signage runs on a different system from classroom displays, creating separate administration and maintenance requirements.
5. Routine updates and configuration changes mean logging into multiple consoles.

If several of these sound familiar, it may be worth looking at whether separate tools are creating more work than they need to. The opportunity isn’t simply to fix individual issues. It’s to consider whether consolidating screen sharing, digital signage and communications onto one platform could simplify the way your school operates.

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