As technology becomes more ingrained in day-to-day learning, it makes sense to use all of the tech available to you. If you want to encourage digital literacy, experiential learning and collaboration among students, digital signage can be a fun, educational tool.
Here are some ideas for classroom projects with digital signage:
Events
As technology becomes more ingrained in day-to-day learning, it makes sense to use all of the tech available to you. If you want to encourage digital literacy, experiential learning and collaboration among students, digital signage can be a fun, educational tool.
Here are some ideas for classroom projects with digital signage:
- Advertise upcoming lacrosse games interspersed with player bios
- Promote the math club, Spanish club and other student organizations
- Highlight upcoming theater and arts happenings
- Build momentum for that upcoming fundraiser or volunteer drive
Announcements
Daily announcements are perfect for digital signage. Since students are already contributing to announcements, why not ask them to take it one step further?
Students can design and schedule digital signage messages showing all or some of the daily announcements so everyone’s reminded of them throughout the day as they look at your screens.
They can also create templates. These are fill-in-the-blank messages that sit in your digital signage system for repeated use. Daily announcements are a great candidate for a template, but so are event calendars, test notices, teacher profiles – anything you think you might want to show on a regular basis.
You could even have a contest for the best message or template design, and let the whole school vote.
Menus
Nutrition is an important focus of today’s schools. The more good information students have about healthy eating and lifestyle, the better. You can wrap this into your digital signage lesson by asking your students to design for your cafeteria signs.
Students can create messages with lunch menus, nutritional information, exercise tips and healthy eating advice. And best of all, their learning about nutrition as they learn the technology.
PowerPoint
If you can build it in PowerPoint, you can show it on your signs. Ask students to design presentations for your big screens and show them off in class or around the school.
The thing to remember about PowerPoint for digital signage is that it needs to be simple. It’s impractical for viewers to try to read a lot of text on a slide, or sit through complicated animations. Students will need to strip down their presentation while still communicating all of the important information.
It’s a new challenge because they’ll have to think differently about how they design for the signs, and you can let them import and schedule their PowerPoints so they get some hands-on experience with your software.
Fun Stuff
Different digital signage systems offer different features, but all of them should let you import photos, JPGs, videos and PowerPoint. Why not let your students choose the media they want to work with?
Let your class explore different multimedia and then show off their projects on digital signs. This can be a stand-alone lesson, or better yet, incorporate it into the subject matter you’re working on:
- Geography lessons using maps, photos and stats
- Timelines for history or social studies lessons
- Scenes from Shakespeare acted out on video
- Art projects from sketches to completed craft
- Show-and-tell presented in a slideshow
- Comic strips created by students on any subject
One very fun idea is to create a digital signage treasure hunt. Schedule different messages like breadcrumbs at different times of the day, or on different screens throughout the school. Ask students to gather the clues and work collaboratively to put the pieces together.
Whatever your students produce, be sure to show it off on your digital signs. Recognition and inclusion help encourage students in all of their activities. It really doesn’t matter what subject your teaching or what grade level – digital signage gives you a great opportunity to engage and motivate this tech-savvy generation.
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