Carousel Digital Signage has helped Our Lady of Grace Catholic School, a PreK-8 school serving students in the Edina, Minnesota area transition from a PowerPoint program to a Carousel Cloud network, providing a professional digital signage experience to students, faculty and visitors as they move through the building. The Carousel Cloud network is now live on 10 screens in hallways, offices and common areas, with an additional five or more end points expected through the end of the 2024-2025 school year.
Our Lady of Grace Catholic School opened in 1949 with eight rooms, and has flourished over the years through the support of the vibrant Parish community. Today, the school enrolls more than 890 students, with the Our Lady of Grace Parish expanding the school’s facilities and education programs in alignment with its growth.
With its growing student body and supportive Catholic community of parents and faculty came the need to improve communication to all relevant audiences, from sharing classroom and workshop activities that highlight student achievements to helping parents navigate the building during special events. While the school’s digital signage program is generally modest, the fact that it’s a one-person show made ease of use a top priority.
Enter Carousel Cloud, which provides a robust set of channel designs and templates through its Carousel Content Library that helps customers quickly launch, update and scale their Carousel Cloud networks. The templates have also made it easy to create content that aligns with the school’s branding, including colors (notably a special shade of purple) and fonts along with a special logo that celebrates the school’s 75th anniversary.
“Carousel offers K12 templates in their Education Collection that makes it easy for me to quickly create professional-looking content that is easy to read and absorb,” said Jackie Gartland, Specialist Teacher, Technology for Our Lady of Grace Catholic School. “That includes the ability to create content from home. I only have so much time available during the school day and my priority is to focus on teaching, and since I handle all network operations the ability to create content and manage the network from home means that our digital signage remains up to date instead of languishing on the backburner.”
Gartland says that on most days the network includes four slides that self-update, and can update bulletins “in about ten minutes,” She points to Carousel’s seamless integration with third-party data and RSS feeds as another win for efficiency, as weather, news and other sources feed into the network with automatic updates to screens. That includes a Saints of the Day RSS feed that provides a daily dose of faith and inspiration for students and faculty alike.
Gartland adds that adding new end points to the Carousel Cloud network is made simpler through its integration with Apple TV devices, which serve as media players for the network. “Our next screen will go live win the 7th grade common area,” she said. “All we really need to do is insert the Carousel app onto the Apple TV, and log into our account. We immediately have a new digital signage end point in place. It’s really that simple.”
