Category: Primary School

How to achieve a free digital signage solution with WordPress

Posted on by primaryt

I have written before about how WordPress can be used as a digital signage solution but never gone into much detail.  I figured the prompt Charles gave me was enough to get me to publish something more verbose..  So here goes…

1. Create a wordpress blog..  I recommend schools use PrimaryBlogger (I’m massively biased) as it has all the plugins already available..

2. Next, goto plugins and activate Showtime Slideshow.

3. Create a new post, Paste in [showtime] to the body of the post

4. Click add an image, upload some images that you want to be visible on your home page slideshow.  Click save all changes

5. Select a suitable theme, remove any widgets you don’t want..  [See Appearance] — I used “Strange little town” in the example.

6. Is your slideshow too fat/thin?  You can change the settings in Media -> Showtime Slideshow

7. To bring in a sliding animated news feed goto plugins and enable Vertically scroll rss feed

8. Click widgets, drag the scroll rss feed widget over to your sidebar.

9. Enter the RSS feed of your choice..  If you don’t know any then maybe use the RSS feed from your blog or from the CBBC news feed or something..

Alright, that’s it..  Visit your blog, press f11 to go full screen and then go from there..

You will probably want to add more widgets and play around more with the objects available on the screen, you can do this by tinkering and having fun 🙂

Enjoy!

 

Introducing the Random name selector tool

Posted on by primaryt

Introducing the Random name selector tool. A simple tool built for teachers to randomly pick a pupil, person, item or object from a list.  

Basically if you have a list of people and you need to pick one then whack their name into a list and click Go..  It will randomly pick someone, give you a pretty animation and some audio output.  I know it’s simple and basic and doesn’t have  many options but that’s the idea behind it.

You can single click share and embed it using an iframe (click Save & Share).

Geek warning: The tool is open source (as it’s 99.9% html/javascript) and is under the Afero GPL license. Just View Source and copy/paste, most of the js objects are from CDNs and you can just grab them too. If you do decide to copy it then please try to keep the credit to me in because I need my ego pleasing. I avoided flash as much as possible so all the animations are done with jQuery.

Oh before I forget, thanks to @PrimaryT aka Primary Technology for funding the development 🙂

Why your school infrastructure matters more today than it did yesterday

Posted on by primaryt

With the launch of PrimaryWall we noticed that we have a number of schools getting periodic dropped connections, this is due to schools infrastructures “dropping packets”.  I was dealing with a school a few months ago who had a technical support provider who promised them that dropping ~5% of packets wouldn’t affect their performance..  This may of been true for their current usage but really-real time web apps such as PrimaryWall and PrimaryPad require that your infrastructure is correctly configured, any packet loss is a potential future failure and should be avoided.  So how can you see if your infrastructure is up to par?

We made a simple heartbeat tool so you can test this yourself.  Enjoy!