Houston-area school district turns to Keywest Technology MediaXtreme

Deer Park School District finds MediaXtreme MX1 fast and easy to use.

Like a lot of teachers, Deepwater Elementary school’s Kelly Grigg spends a portion of each school day in front of her computer, pointing and clicking, dropping and dragging and entering important data.

But unlike most of her colleagues, Grigg’s efforts aren’t aimed solely at tweaking lesson plans, entering grades or creating class handouts. Rather, the technology support leader at the Pasadena, Texas, grade school spends her time creating information channel displays that deliver everything from high-tech pats on back for budding grade school readers to activity schedules and menus.

“Before we did a lot of paper information dissemination -especially for the kids,” explained Grigg. “But now we just turn on the TV tuned into our character generator channel and what the students need to know is right on the television. It’s much more visual, and the kids really like it.”

Deepwater Elementary is one of 14 schools in the Deer Park School District to have modernized its communications efforts with the help of a Keywest Technology MediaXtreme MX1 information messaging system and a district-wide fiber optic wide area network (WAN) and CATV installation.

“The great thing about the MediaXtreme,” said district director of network systems Ryan Petru, “is you can put anything in there -not just text but pictures and snippets of live video, even sound can be used.”

Each Deer Park School District campus has its own channel on the broadband WAN/CATV system to display unique messaging from its own dedicated MX1 system. Campuses can look at each other’s messaging pages simply by changing channels, and district headquarters can override the campus messaging channels with its own information pages in an emergency.

MediaXtreme MX1 multimedia messaging
The Keywest Technology MediaXtreme is a multimedia messaging system that displays multi-zone text, graphics, crawls, MPEG video clips, sound and data. The product is built around a powerful CG (character generator) program called MediaCreator that’s easy to learn and use. MediaCreator runs on any Windows™-based computer (Windows 95 to XP). In addition to its CG duties, MediaCreator lets users import graphics or select graphics and backgrounds from the Digital Juice™ library to create messaging pages that look as if they came from network television.

Saved messaging pages can be previewed for accuracy and then scheduled for automated playback 24/7 along with MPEG video, sound and text crawls. Options like video picture-in-picture insertion, AP Top Headline News™ crawls, a weather station and synchronized A/V switcher for inserting multiple video feeds are available.

Once the schedule is downloaded to the MX1 from the PC running MediaCreator, the process is complete. New events, scheduling changes and content can be loaded on the MX1 even while it plays back previously scheduled information displays, ensuring continuity of multimedia messaging.

Far more than the network-television-quality messaging pages created with the MX1 impressed Petru. The ease with which the messaging system could be integrated into the district’s WAN/CATV design –controllable and accessible remotely from ordinary PCs running MediaCreator via a TCP/IP connection- made the MediaXtreme ideal.

“In the old days with CGs, in order to make changes you had to be on the site with the box and make changes to computer it was running on,” said Petru. “The good thing about the MediaXtreme is that with its client application you can make changes to the CG and anything going on it remotely while the MediaXtreme remains located in our central operation center.” That alone eliminated the need for a technician to drive to any of the 14 campuses in the school district where maintenance might be required.

Joyous Walking In
In the 27 years Garry Wilkison of Austin Digital Media’s has been designing AV systems for educators, the consultant has lost count of the times he’s seen unused technology in schools gathering dust. But that definitely wasn’t the case with the MX1 systems he specified for the Deer Park School District installation.

“What was most remarkable about the MX1 is that after the training -even before the distribution system was completed- three-quarters of the MediaXtremes were in use immediately,” said Wilkison, who was with OTM Engineering in Austin when he designed the Deer Park system. “It was actually joyous to walk in and see a TV in the lobby with the menu for the week and upcoming activities.”

To get Deer Park educators started on the right foot with the MX1, QC TV Corp. in Houston, which sold the systems to the district, invited Keywest to conduct a day-long training session at the district’s WAN/CATV headquarters.

“The people responsible for using the MediaXtreme from each school went through the one-day class and the next day were creating content for their schools from their campuses,” said Tom Palmer of QC TV. “As the training proceeded, we gave the district’s personnel a chance to load school colors and mascot logos onto the machines and give them immediate feedback.”

“It didn’t take long before the person responsible for messaging at one school would be about to use a cool transition or font and that person’s counterpart at another school wanted to one up them,” recalled Deer Park School District’s Petru. “It became a real competition among the schools.”

In fact, the MX1 is responsible for a friendly rivalry Grigg of Deepwater Elementary has with a colleague elsewhere in the district. “One lady at another campus is a good friend, and we are constantly one upping each other,” she said. “It really keeps us on our toes.”

More importantly, the MX1 has given the district an important new tool to inform, inspire and motivate its students that’s simple to use. “I use the MediaXtreme everyday,” said Grigg. “It’s great, and easy-to-use. It always works, the connections are good, the graphics are great, it’s fast, and I can look on the TV and see what I’ve just created.”

“And it’s given us a new way to recognize our students publicly for their achievements,” Grigg said. “We have a reading program that rewards students with points. I put a 50-point student up on the CG channel to recognize his achievement and it isn’t long before I’m taking him down and putting him up as a 100-point reader with his picture.”

“The kids notice that and like be recognized on TV,” she said.