When Cardinal Gibbons High School in North Carolina started rolling Vivi out across their campus, it was the ease of use that had their teachers hooked. Amy Ernenwein, Director of Professional Development, who describes her role as doing “everything I can to help teachers be the best they can be for students” recalls the gradual increase of Vivi.
“We are at 100% full integration; we have a Vivi in every room. We now even have Vivi places that aren’t our classrooms, we have them in social gathering places. We started in 2018 with one classroom, it was a math classroom, and then we put it in a world languages classroom.
“We just started to slowly roll it out to more classrooms and what happened was that people started talking about how much they loved it and that it was so easy to use. The presentation part of Vivi is so easy to use that when it was about adding a layer, or a new feature, it was such an easy thing to add because it already had the perception in our school that it was so easy to use.”
Cardinal Gibbons don’t just use Vivi in the classroom, however. With built-in digital signage functionality, they take a two-part approach to maximizing value in communal spaces.
“The use of digital signage plays multiple roles. Obviously, it’s informational, which is really important. In terms of hygiene and sanitation and good practice when it comes to caring for our space in a healthy way. However, I can see us doing a lot more positive messaging and things like dad jokes, you know? Just to make people laugh. Just as a way to say it doesn’t always have to be serious.”
Amy also encourages the use of live broadcast as a way to communicate to the entire school, without having them physically cram together.
“We’re a Catholic school, so we do hold an almost-2000-people mass in our gym. It’s amazing, but the likelihood of us being able to manage that in the near future is probably not feasible. So being able to live stream that into a classroom will be really amazing and create a semblance of shared experience without everyone physically being in that one space.
“Vivi serves an integral purpose in our school because it’s so integrated into our learning experience. Its ease of use, its transcendence across devices will have a very large impact.”
