Mirada Media Expands Digital Signage Offerings to Education Sector

École Secondaire Hormisdas-Gamelin, a public high school in Gatineau, Québec, has engaged Mirada Media to install digital signage in their high-traffic areas.

Digital signage for education

Montréal, February 5, 2009 – Mirada Media, a leading provider of digital signage integration for the province of Québec, is pleased to announce the recent installation of its ChannelView system at Hormisdas-Gamelin high school, located in Gatineau, Québec. The project marks Mirada’s entry into digital signage integration for the education sector.

Digital signage contentHormisdas-Gamelin needed a medium through which it could complement its oral announcements and reduce paper-based bulletins, as well as a means to increase the effectiveness of its communications to the over 1600 students who are enrolled at the school. With these objectives in mind, Mirada installed its ChannelView digital signage system with five commercial-grade 40-inch LCD screens at Hormisdas-Gamelin. Four of these screens are located in the cafeteria, where virtually every student will be able to view them. The remaining screen is placed at the front entrance, and is viewable by students, staff, teachers, and visitors upon entering and leaving the building. The system is used to keep people abreast of in-class news and extracurricular activities such as school trips, sport team performance, and interscholastic competition rankings.

The use of digital signage in the educational sector has largely been restricted to universities until recently, and installations in K-12 schools are becoming more popular, as children continue to be exposed to digital media at younger ages. Eric Morello, Mirada Media’s director of marketing, expects this trend to continue, arguing that “Digital signage is the natural evolution of audio- and text-based communications within schools. With today’s generation growing up in a media-rich environment, using printed and verbal announcements no longer has the same effectiveness that it did years ago. Digital signage is the ideal solution for communicating to students, as it is a visually engaging medium that can help in distributing the message to a media-savvy audience.”

Digital signage in a cafeteria

Ease of use was also a key selling point for Hormisdas-Gamelin in adopting Mirada’s ChannelView digital signage system. In just a few minutes, users can log into an intranet site, prepare the text, add images, and publish their content. Remi Racine, one of Hormisdas-Gamelin’s vice-principals, enjoys the ChannelView system, and says that “the system is easy to use and almost no training was required”. In addition, should any changes to the school’s content be required, modifications can be made in real time via the user-friendly ChannelView system without disrupting the display and cycling of content.

About École Secondaire Hormisdas-Gamelin

École Secondaire Hormisdas-Gamelin offers many vocational and training programs in addition to its general education (grades 7-11) offering. These programs can be consulted at http://web.cscv.qc.ca/030/.

For more information about this press release, please contact Mirada Media at (514) 789-1989 or visit www.MiradaMedia.com.

Digital Signage Updates for mid-June

We have a few interesting projects in the works that should be completed before the end of the summer. We’re helping a new “urban cafeteria” launch with a bang! We’re currently installing a fully digital menu board system for their early July opening in downtown Montreal. The system will feature three 46″ commercial-grade LCD’s to display menu items and promote sales, special items, and their branding. They are also planning to launch 3 other locations across Montreal so we could be seeing a lot more dynamic menu boards in this part of the world.

We’re also proud to announce our first digital signage project in a school! We’re going to be setting up a 5 screen infoboard system in western Quebec this summer.

On a similar note, we will soon be publishing a case on another information system we installed at a large sports center in northern Montreal. Although we never officially announced it, the system has been running since this winter but we should be publishing a release in the coming week.