A smart school district knows that teaching students
is just one of its responsibilities, and the Manatee
County School District in Bradenton, Fla., is smart.
by Bob Kovacs
|
|
Stefano Biancardi (bottom),
EDV-TV instructional TV &
program manager for
Manatee County Schools,
runs Studio 2 switcher during
a health program recording
session, with Byron D. Romey
(studio left), account manager
at Corporate Care Works,
and Forrest Branscomb
(studio right), director of risk
management, School Board
of Manatee County.
|
|
With tough economic times pressing down hard
on taxpayers, it makes a lot of sense for a school district
to reach out to the public to show where the
money is going and how students are being educated.
In Manatee County, the school uses a multichannel
television system to provide diverse educational
presentations inside the school and to the greater
off-campus community.
“We call the program EdVantage,” Stefano
Biancardi, instructional TV and program manager for
the district, said of its channel, EDV-TV.
EDV-TV went online in December 2007 and
builds on the district’s many years of experience with
Instructional Television Fixed Service (ITFS) broadcasts
to the community. Starting December 2009,
EDV-TV added an on-demand Web-based delivery
system that’s more viewer-friendly and convenient.
In addition to having five in-school channels and
a Web-based service, the Manatee County School
District also feeds a channel to Verizon and
Brighthouse, the two cable companies in the county.
Creating programs and accommodating playbacks
is a daunting task, and the school district
wanted to keep the work manageable for its technical
staff. The solution to erasing the workload was a
server with an easy-to-program interface.
Manatee County decided on a Cablecast server
from Tightrope Media Systems, and also included
Tightrope’s Carousel digital signage capability for bulletin
board announcements. Cablecast and Carousel
are tightly integrated and complement each other.
The system will automatically switch to Carousel
when a program is done, so that the bulletins and
announcements run between programs.
|
|
Student interns
man the master
control room at
the Manatee
County School
District.
|
|
To create its own content, the school district has
substantial facilities that include two multi-camera studios, editing rooms, eight satellite feeds and a
new master control room. Material shot in the studios
can be fed live to the various channels, it can be
recorded on DVD for future playbacks, or saved on
the Tightrope server for Web streaming.
The school uses Panasonic digital studio cameras
in its studios, and switches them with Echolab
switchers. Interestingly, studio programs are often
recorded directly to DVD, then mounted in one of
the JVC multidisk DVD players in the control room.
The Tightrope Cablecast automation system then
controls the JVC DVD players.
After just a handful of weeks with content on the
Internet and available anywhere in the world,
Biancardi is seeing activity from well outside
Manatee County.
Biancardi supervises the EDV-TV system with a
full-time staff and five student interns. So far, the
extra load from going online has been picked up by
the Cablecast automation.
In the meantime, students at the Manatee
County School District have access to complex
media creation and distribution systems, which provides
considerable educational opportunities.
To reduce the number of people needed for studio
production, three of the four cameras in Studio-1 are remotely controllable, using Telemetrics robotics.
“Yesterday, we shot a program and it just took
two of us,” Biancardi said.
In addition to local recording on DVD and VCR
backup, studio programs can be fed through Knox
routing switchers to the master control facility.
There, programs can be encoded to MPEG files for
storage on the Cablecast server or fed live to the
internal and external networks.
To handle all the activity, there are four Tightrope
servers: a Cablecast server for EDV-TV and instructional
television, a Carousel server for digital signage,
a video-on-demand server and the EDV-TV
streaming video server.
“The Cablecast system’s internally generated Web
pages link to our own Web site,” Biancardi said.
“When someone clicks on our Web page, the server
automatically spools the schedule to the screen.”
Cablecast also provides a search function so that
a viewer can find and view on-demand programs.
Since Cablecast has a Web interface, Biancardi can
access it across the Internet to view the schedule and
make changes.
“I was on a cruise to Europe this summer and
was able to connect to the server from my laptop to
make last-minute changes,” he said. “Of course, my
wife wasn’t too happy about that.”
Hardware is wonderful but it only goes so far-the
important thing is how the hardware is being used.
Two television programs produced by the Manatee
County School District are broadcast throughout the
state on the Florida Knowledge Network. These are
“Soloists,” a classical music program shot at the
Ringling Museum of Arts, and “Learning With the
Chefs,” about cooking and food preparation.
At the moment, the Manatee County systems are
standard-definition, although some early thought
has been given to an eventual move to HD. For
example, the school’s newest Panasonic studio cameras
are HD, but are being down-converted to SD at
the moment. Biancardi says that an eventual
upgrade to HD will involve nearly the entire system,
and that’s out of the question at this time.
Television has long been a partner with education.
At the Manatee County School District,
educators are leveraging the Internet and automation
to reach out to the community and beyond.
Students get to participate in a nationally recognized
program and the community benefits from
the educational and cultural offerings. And if a
grandmother a continent away can get online and
watch a performance of her granddaughter, who
can put a price on that?
|