About Marietta High School
New programs prepare students for real-world careers and college pursuits, with LG displays used for teaching, collaboration, highlighting student works and school-wide digital signage. Marietta High School, a Georgia College and Career Academy, recently joined the State’s growing career prep education initiative, where students are given tools and course options that go far beyond the average public education experience. With ‘Career Pathways’ that provide college prep and training for careers in locally significant sectors such as digital media production, construction trades, sciences, nursing and medicine, game design, engineering, architecture and more, the school is a beacon of expansive student opportunity that represents a 21st Century version of the traditional trade school.
signage infrastructure. The result? Marietta College & Career Academy’s new technology is worthy of a college campus.
“Georgia is focused on making its education system more workforce-oriented, and to do so, the schools need to reflect workplace realities,” said a member of the Solutionz team involved with the planning of the project. “For our part, we helped the school design and implement a consolidated system of LG displays that extends through the entire campus.
This centrally-controlled display network reflects what college campuses are currently doing, and the benefits include eliminating the need for ineffective paper signage,
increasing energy efficiency by enabling school-wide automation for startup and shutdown each day, and delivering more dynamic learning environments that increase student engagement.”
The Solutionz team emphasized that while the building’s new J-Hall, a 55,000-squarefoot addition, received the bulk of the new LG digital displays, a minimum of 15 displays are also now active in hallways throughout existing areas of the school.
“This school may never need to print a pamphlet or brochure again,” a team member added. “Administrators have determined that paper signs and posters just do not engage students who all have digital screens in their pockets, and they expect important messages to be delivered in a modern way. That is not a fad that’s going to reverse, so the school invested in platforms they know the students respond to and are interested in.”
Jason Meade, Associate Principal & Career Pathways Supervisor said, “The full display network is quite a marvel for a public high school. Starting in the Career Center, where students can speak with college training experts and career counselors, the college and career sections of the space each feature a 3x1 vertical video walls composed of 75” LG 4K displays, plus four smaller adjacent displays. Like many of the school’s new displays, these two video walls and eight adjacent displays are centrally operated through a Crestron control system and offer wireless content sharing, HDMI input through wall mounted ports and screen sharing from mobile devices.
In the Grand Entry Hall students are kept informed by eight 49” LG displays mounted above doors and windows. These displays present the same digital signage content found on all the hallway displays, which is distributed through a third-party DDS software.
“In classrooms, the displays command higher attention and allow teachers greater flexibility in lesson presentations. The game design classroom is one of the most display-heavy areas in the school, with its two separate rooms each containing three 2x2 video walls with 49” displays, giving instructors six 98” canvasses. This design increases flexibility for upper-level courses that often have fewer students, and it provides additional opportunity to enhance social distancing as schools work to ensure student and staff safety,” added Meade.
Torey Bradley, Director of Technology & Information Systems for Marietta City Schools, noted how the traditional education system was uprooted in 2020, and how this College & Career Academy’s timely investment in communications technologies aided educators and students throughout the school year.
“So much about in-person experiences have changed in the last year, it’s really fortuitous that Marietta City Schools had already planned and invested in this display network,” Bradley said. “The school’s handle on technology has been instrumental to students’ continued success throughout the Covid pandemic. The College and Career Counselors have been able to use video collaboration services to connect with students to plan their futures, and even orchestrate Zoom-based virtual job shadowing. I imagine this is the direction all schools will go, because virtual collaboration is not going to go away - in fact it will only become more important in the future.”
Outside the hallways and core classrooms, a new ‘Board Room’ in J-Hall offers a more open-style 25-seat meeting space complete with a 3x3 LG video wall. Overlooking the school’s football field, the multi-use room is used to host internal meetings, conduct virtual interviews with job candidates, and as a classroom for smaller upper-level courses that include regular discussion, not just teacher-led instruction.