We're just putting the finishing touches to our new Education plugin which we will be unveiling at the BETT 2010 show which begins on Wednesday this week.

This new plugin should make it a lot easier for schools to use MediaCAT as Electronic Notice Boards, especially when you have several of them dotted around the site.

The idea behind the education plugin is to allow staff to update messages and display screens on the MediaCAT with the minimal amount of training. We've taken the four most common types of display which schools might want to show and created very easy to use pages for entering information.

The plugin includes all of the playlists, scenes and groups required to get the education display system working as quickly as possible. All you need to do, is upload your School's logo, enter your School's name and select the location of the screen; Reception, Canteen, Staff Room, and Student Areas. Non-admin staff can login to the dedicated plugin web interface which provides a very simple and easy to use front end for entering messages, events, or menus.

Messages

The message page uses the very nice Xinha HTML Editor which we also use in the scenes and file editor interface for the MediaCAT to allow users to edit web pages directly via the MediaCAT interface.

Most people just use this to change font sizes, styles and colours, but if you want to get really clever you can add tables, images etc. This is ideal for creating quick splash pages with announcements such as 'The School is closed today due to snow'.


Events

The events page lets you enter all of the important events for the school in advance using an easy clickable calendar interface. The events scene will show the top 5 pending events, with old events automatically being removed from the list. This lets you setup all the important dates in the school diary at the start of every term and lets the MediaCAT handle when to show them.


Results

When we were at school (many years ago!), we found one of the most important bits of paper on the notice board was the sporting results sheet. MediaCAT lets you keep this and makes it a lot easier to setup too! Multiple results tables can be setup for all the different sports, and entering data into them is just a matter of entering text into a table.



Canteen

Everyone wants to know whats for lunch, so we added this page too. Canteen staff can enter the upcoming weeks menu and have each the right menu displayed for each day of the week. To make life easier we've added an option to save/restore menus for each day, so if the same menu is used repeatedly, it can be copied to a day with a click of the button.


So what do you actually see on the screen? Click on the thumbs below for each type.



Whilst the plugin is hard coded with just those four types at the moment, it got us thinking about how easy it would be to make each one a template so that new display types could be created and customised by users - perhaps we'll look at that after the show!