Using an Apple TV and a Flickr account to automate the display of student art work

The walls of our district offices are filled with student art – and I love that, but I’d really like to enable even more student art work to be on display.  So I spent some time yesterday connecting a Flickr account to a TV display.  The idea of is simple….  An art teacher could use a standard Flickr account (www.flickr.com) to store photos of student projects.  If they create a set (sort of like a folder) of specific photos/projects, we can target that specific set to be displayed on a TV.  The teacher could then control which photos are on display at our offices and the TV would take care of automatically running the slide show.

We’ll most likely add some extra TVs for art work displays this fall, and my guess is that several of our schools will also be using the idea to display extra art work in their hallways.

Here’s the setup and tricks that we found related to it….

We used an Apple TV ($99) and an HDMI cable to connect to the TV.  Of course, the TV also has to have an HDMI connection.  Connect the Apple TV to the wireless network, then go to setting to make sure the Apple TV is set to never sleep.  In the screen saver settings, select Flickr for your screen saver, connecting to the specific Flickr account and set of photos you want to display.  I then set the display mode to random, which means that the way the photos are displayed will change approximately every hour.  For the Start After setting, I set it to 2 minutes, meaning that if someone activates the Apple TV, the slide show will automatically kick back in after 2 minutes.  I’ve let the screen saver run for several days on a TV display and so far it seems to run well and doesn’t ever break from the screen saver mode.  Looking forward to seeing more student art work….

UPDATE:  In further testing, we found that if the Apple TV is running continuously, then it doesn’t receive any new pictures that the teacher uploads to Flickr.  However, we solved that with a simple Christmas tree timer.  We set the timer to turn the Apple TV off each night at 1am for a few minutes, then power it back on.  As soon as its back on, it takes 2 minutes for slide show to kick back on and at that time it will look to Flickr to update all the photos.

What our staff thinks of our district technology services… 2013 edition

Each year we conduct a satisfaction survey with our school district staff.  It’s a relatively short survey, and we’ve used many of the same questions multiple years in a row. Our goal is to track customer services.  For example, we don’t ask questions related to the latest gadget or gizmo… instead, we focus on fundamental customer service points –  as our belief is that quality customer service will always be needed regardless of the device.

View/Download the full staff survey results (pdf file)

Summary of the results…

Satisfied with response time and communications.

“The guys are great. They are helpful and in good spirits when they have to
come into my room. They never make me feel as though my questions are silly,
though they probably are. :)”

“Repairs are handled in a timely manner.”

“I also appreciate the new and innovative ideas presented at
professional development. I have worked in other districts before where the
technology department was somewhat a mystery – I very much appreciate the
transparency of the department in WDM and the efforts to move forward with
technology in a timely manner.”

Desire for more iPads at elementary level..

“Teachers should have more than 3 iPads.”

More training needed…

“We are way behind other districts. We need tech integrationists to help teachers
integrate tech. Jackie does a great job, but 1 person is not enough.”

“More WED collab day trainings. I think we are severely lacking those.”

“I would like to see more time given to the technology department during staff
development to share new ideas.”

NOTE FROM BRIAN:  In regards to Wed collaboration days, most collab. day topics are decided at your building level.  Talk to your building staff that oversee your Wed collab days, as we’d be glad to help you out!

Fair isn’t equal

“Bluntly, I don’t feel like access to technology is allocated in an appropriate
manner. However, I don’t feel like that is the technology dep’t’s fault. I really
think the board and TLS need to examine which schools are in the most need of
district contributed funds to purchase and update technology. We really need to
get out of this mindset that fair is equal.”

Access

“still not enough computers in our building. Much much better since we got a cart
for each team, but still hard to plan lessons if you don’t know if the devices will
be available”

More information about updates…

“Updating technology i.e. IC Revtrack, Paypal it would be nice to know what the updates are before we go in and find that something has changed.”

NOTE FROM BRIAN: We certainly agree that it would be great to have more knowledge of how the updates will impact, unfortunately, this isn’t always possible as we are reliant on what information is given by our vendors.  We also have a significant amount of our own customizations in things like Campus and RevTrak – that makes it hard for vendors to tell how their updates will impact our customizations.

Dedicated staff for K-6 technology integration

“Other surrounding districts have technology teachers for each building and are
implementing classes that teach technology skills to their young people. This
should not fall on the shoulders of regular classroom teachers.”

NOTES FROM BRIAN:  This concern has been raised over the past few years, however, it is significant to note that Waukee this past year moved away from this model and the elementary “tech teacher” is now dedicated towards training staff members how to integrate technology into the grade level classrooms.

How do the results compare to prior years?

How does the survey work?

All staff receive a short on-line survey. Each question is a positive statement such as, “When members of the district technology departments visit my building, they are courteous and treat the staff and students with respect.”   Users are asked to rate the statement as: Strongly Agree,   Agree,  Disagree,  Strongly Disagree, or  I don’t know.

For the summary charts below,  % Strongly Agree + % Agree =  Approval rating (which is the blue bars below).  In other words, we only count if they positively agree with a statement.  If we scored a 90% approval rating, that means 90% of the responses were Strongly Agree or Agree.

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For the charts above….

Overall = How we did based on all survey responses

Teachers = How we did based on classroom teacher responses only

Support = How we did based on support staff responses only