Digital signage for schools is a handful of screens in the places people already look: the entrance hall, the main corridor, the staff room and the canteen. They show what has changed today (a room swap, a cancelled lesson, a teacher covering), what is coming up (the school play, exam week, parents' evening), the canteen menu, student work and, when it matters, an emergency message on every screen at once. It is changed from a browser rather than with drawing pins. For what SignageStack does for a school or university, see digital signage for schools; this article is about what to show and who keeps it current.
A school can start with a TV it already owns, a small Android box or an old computer behind it, and a software subscription. Whether the screens are still useful in March has little to do with the hardware. It depends on two things: one named person owns the content, and the screens switch on and off with the school day without anyone having to remember them.
What should a school screen show?
Screens work when each one has a job that fits where it hangs. A corridor screen is read in passing, in two or three seconds. A screen by the canteen queue gets a minute. The staff room screen can carry detail that visitors in the entrance should not see.
Where | Who reads it | What goes on it |
|---|---|---|
Entrance and reception | Visitors, parents, everyone arriving | A welcome, today's events, a sign-in reminder, a QR code to the newsletter |
Main corridor | Students on the move | Today's changes, the next big date, one announcement at a time |
Staff room | Teachers only | Cover, meetings, duty rota, deadlines |
Canteen | The queue | This week's menu, clubs starting, lost property |
Content that tends to earn its place:
- Today's changes. Room swaps, cancelled lessons, a club moved to Thursday. This is what students actually stop for.
- Announcements. One per slide, a few words in large type. The Text app centres a short message and scales it to the screen. A paragraph does not read from across a corridor.
- Countdowns. Days to the exams, the school trip or the end of term. The Countdown app runs on the screen's own clock, so it needs no network.
- The events calendar. If the school keeps its events in Google Calendar, the Google Calendar app shows one calendar as a list of upcoming events and picks up changes by itself. It only reads the calendar; it never changes it.
- Student work. Photos from the art room, a video the media club made. Upload them to the media library and they play from the screen's own storage. Show only what your photo consent covers.
- The canteen menu. The Menu board app, or the caterer's weekly PDF in the PDF Reader, which turns the pages by itself.
- A ticker. A band along the bottom of the corridor screens for the one line everyone needs today: "Year 9 assembly moved to the sports hall". It stays until someone takes it off, so give it an owner.
In effect the corridor screen becomes a digital bulletin board that never has last month's notice on it. For a longer list, see our digital signage content ideas.
Can the screen show our timetable or cover plan?
It is usually the first question, so here is the plain answer: SignageStack has no integration with school timetabling or management systems. It does not read your cover plan from them.
What it can do:
- Show a public web page. If your timetabling system publishes a display page or public view that opens without a login, the Web page app can show it. Paste the address and look at the preview. If the preview stays blank, the site does not allow itself to be shown inside another page, and nothing on our side can override that. A page that needs a login also comes up blank. Test this before you promise anyone.
- Show a shared spreadsheet. If cover is kept in a Google Sheet, the Google Sheets app shows the first tab as a clean table and checks for edits every minute. It reads columns A to Z and the first 100 rows.
- Show a PDF. If the system exports the day's plan as a PDF, upload it to the PDF Reader each morning (files up to 10 MB). It keeps playing offline, but it is a manual step every day.
- Type it. In a small school, three lines typed into a Text slide or the ticker at 7:45 is often the quickest route of all.
Whichever route you take, remember that a corridor screen is public. Visitors and parents walk past it. Show rooms, classes and times, and keep pupils' names, and anything that would embarrass someone, off it.
Scheduling around the school day
A school has a rhythm. The screens can switch on and off with it by themselves; what they show is changed by a person.
- Working hours. Each screen can have hours for each day of the week, with Saturday and Sunday switched off entirely, and outside them it goes to standby. There is no school-holiday calendar for this, so before a long break someone changes the hours or switches the screen off.
- Changes during the day. SignageStack does not switch content by time of day on its own. If the notices and the lunch menu are both valid all day, keep both in the loop. If not, switch the morning item off and the lunchtime item on at break; it takes seconds from a phone and reaches the screen in seconds.
- Things that end. Exam week, the open evening, the book fair: nothing takes them down by itself. Put the end date in the office calendar and switch the item off, or delete it, when it is over, so nobody is looking at a poster from March in June.
- Never blank by accident. The screen loops whatever items it has and plays them until you change them or its working hours end. It goes dark only outside working hours.
Working hours are evaluated on the device, so a screen goes to standby and comes back on time even on a day when the school's internet is down. Uploaded images and video, text, countdowns, QR codes and PDFs all keep playing offline. Apps that load live from the internet, such as a web page or a YouTube video, are skipped until the connection returns.
Emergency messages
The Emergency Alert app is the one feature a school should set up on the first day, well before it is needed. You write the alerts in advance ("Evacuate the building", "School closes at 12:00 today"), choose the screens and leave them switched off. When something happens, one switch in the dashboard covers every chosen screen within a second, including screens in standby outside their working hours. Switching it off gives the screens back to their content.
Everyone involved should know its limits. The alert is silent. It reaches each screen over that screen's connection, so a screen that is offline at that moment shows it only when it reconnects. It is a second channel next to your fire alarm and PA system, never a replacement for them.
Who runs the screens?
School screens tend to fail the same way. An enthusiastic teacher sets them up in September, and by November they are still advertising the harvest festival. Decide who owns them before you buy anything.
- One owner. Usually the school office, because it hears about every change first. The office owns the playlists and the weekly clear-out.
- Contributors. Heads of year, the PE department, the librarian. They add their own items to a shared playlist.
- People who only need to look. A head teacher who wants to see what is on the screens without editing anything.
SignageStack has three roles that match this. An Admin invites people and manages the organisation's settings. A Member can work with screens, playlists and media. A Viewer sees everything and changes nothing. Roles apply to the whole organisation rather than to single screens, so "the PE department only edits the sports hall screen" is an agreement between colleagues, not a setting.
Student contributions are a good idea: the student council's poster, the media club's video. Route them through a member of staff rather than giving students their own logins. The service is sold to organisations, is not meant for children, and does not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 16.
Ten minutes on a Monday morning is enough upkeep. Remove what has expired, check the week's dates, and look at the dashboard, which shows each screen's live status and when it last checked in.
What does digital signage for schools cost?
Much of the hardware may already be in a cupboard somewhere.
- The display. A TV the school already has is fine for a trial. Its limits show later: a consumer TV is built for a few hours a day, while a commercial panel is rated for 12 to 24. A screen that runs through the whole school day, every day, is where a commercial display earns its price. Size it by distance. A common rule of thumb is that the furthest reader should be no more than six screen heights away for large text, and our guide to digital signage screen size has the table.
- The player. An Android TV box with Android 8 or newer and 2 GB of RAM typically costs somewhere between €40 and €120. The SignageStack player on it starts at boot, comes back after a power cut on a box that powers itself on, and repairs a frozen page by itself. That matters for a screen nobody checks until something goes wrong. Our article on the Android TV box for digital signage covers what to look for. An old PC or laptop works too, running the web player full-screen in a browser.
- What not to rely on. A TV's built-in browser can open the web player, but it will not restart itself after a power cut or stay locked in full-screen. For an unattended corridor, put a box behind the TV.
- Mounting. High enough to be out of reach of bags and footballs, with the box where the caretaker can reach it, and the cables in trunking.
- The network. The player needs only outbound HTTPS: no open ports, no VPN. That is usually a short conversation with IT. If the school's web filter blocks YouTube, it blocks it on the screen too, so upload video files rather than linking to them.
The software is €11 per screen per month, or €100 per screen per year, excluding VAT, with every feature in one plan. Three screens on annual billing come to €300 a year before VAT. Payment is by bank transfer against an invoice. The data processing agreement is published on the site and can be signed, and the sub-processors that host the service are named, processing data in the EU and the US. If you are weighing up a free route, a slideshow from a USB stick in the TV costs nothing but cannot be changed from the office; our look at free digital signage software goes through the trade-offs.
Where to start
Start with one screen in the entrance, where parents and visitors see it. Open the web player in a browser on any laptop, type the six-character code it shows into the dashboard under Add screen, and build a first playlist of four items: a welcome, this week's dates, a countdown to the next big event, and a QR code to the school website. If you want to know whether your timetabling system's display page will work, paste its address into the Web page app and watch the preview.
The trial runs for 21 days with every feature on one screen, and needs no card. That is long enough to find out whether the office will keep the screen up to date, which is the test that matters.
