Extron AV Technology Enhances Community Communications at Caldwell County Schools Boardroom

The Caldwell County School System in North Carolina equipped their boardroom with a modern audiovisual system that shows meeting agendas and presentations on multiple screens around the room for those attending in-person and streams broadcasts of board meetings to viewers attending meetings virtually. Mobile modular furniture and a versatile Extron NAV Pro AV over IP system elevates a humble meeting room into a hub of innovation and collaboration. Constantly booked, the venue hosts community forums, teacher in-service training sessions, K-12 classes, and monthly school board meetings. Eight AV-equipped workstations line the walls of the room. The workstations independently originate and display AV content shareable to the other workstations and to the Internet. Each workstation has a unique color ID, signified by the color of the buttons on its touchpanel user interface.

“People from other North Carolina school districts and neighboring states have attended meetings in this room, and they are definitely impressed,” says Cody Greene, Technology Director at Caldwell County School System, who operates and maintains the AV system. “The AV system is rock solid in continuous day-to-day operation, and the only maintenance performed has been planned upgrades and operator interface changes.”

To support active learning and other use cases where people collaborate in small groups and also share to neighboring groups in the room, each workstation has its own display, PC, NAV encoder, NAV scaling decoder, and TouchLink Pro touchpanel. ShareLink Pro wireless presentation systems allow wireless sharing from portable devices. Multicolor LED light strips controlled by the AV system backlight the top and bottom of each station display to indicate at a glance which station is originating the content appearing on the screen. The bottom backlight shows the workstation’s own color ID, while the top backlight shows the color ID of the workstation supplying the displayed content. The district’s in-house IT/AV team designed, installed, programmed and operates the boardroom AV system.