The Cutout Maker is used extensively to help showcase material posted around each classroom. For example, many teachers have created a bulletin board using the Cutout Maker’s letters and shapes to create a vivid background to post student work on. These bulletin boards provide the students the opportunity to see the progress they’ve made.

Each teacher also has a word wall somewhere in their classroom. It may be a portion of their wall or a bulletin board devoted to displaying vocabulary for the lessons and unit the students are currently working on. Many of the teachers got creative with the headings that they designed on the Cutout Maker labeling their word walls as “Word Blast” or “Vocab is Fab!”. Some teachers even took the time to create the vocabulary words on the Cutout Maker too!

The majority of the classrooms I stopped in also created headings for their essential questions so the students knew where to look to find the questions. This creates uniformity – most of the teachers posted their headings on the left side of their white board so they could easily change the question as the unit progressed and the students are able to look to the same location in every classroom.

Ms. Grau, a Language Arts teacher, created a poster entitled “Questions to Promote Thinking Skills”. The questions posed on the poster help the students learn how to think more critically when reading passages, novels, articles and poetry. On a different portion of her wall, she had several brick posters. Each student from each class period fills in a brick with one of the books he or she read recently, also adding a one to five star rating. This way, the students share the books they like or dislike with each other.

Another teacher created a poster on her door listing different ways for students to interact with text. This gives them something to read while waiting to enter the room. On the list were things like write a letter to the author, write a one minute radio advertisement about the book, and design a time line of events from the book. The media center has posted an essential question above the computers reminding students about how to implement their researching skills.

Sports seasons are in full swing. If you have a lot of attendants for school games and parking is troublesome, why not create “season parking passes” with the Awards Maker? You can sell hang tags for attendants to hang from their rear-view mirror that get them access to the sought after parking spots!

Take time to promote school spirit and raise some funds for your school at the same time. During a sporting event, make an announcement that you’re going to have a battle between the school spirit of the two teams. You’re going to count how many school stickers they can buy by the end of the game. Take your Awards Maker and Design Center to the game to print stickers and bumper stickers to sell to the spectators. Between quarters, give the audience an update on who is winning to try and ramp up the sales!

Click here for an example of how to use your Awards Maker

Visitors saw how the VariQuest Poster Maker, Cutout Maker, and Awards Maker can be used to create revenue for their schools. The booth was set up as a school store with samples of items the students could sell to students, staff and even the community. Lenn Fraraccio and Alex Millender, a couple of our sales representatives, shared some of the ways these tools can be used.

One big school event is the awards banquet. Schools often have to have a list of students receiving awards weeks in advance to be able to order the awards. With the Awards Maker, the students could be in charge of fulfilling the plaque orders in house which saves both time and money.

High Schools have unique fundraising opportunities, thanks to seniors and sports teams. The Awards Maker can create car window decals for the “Class of 2009” High School and Middle School sports teams can sell posters with a photo of the team and the game schedule. Stickers that say “I support Girls’ Volleyball”, “Go Lancers!”, or a school letter are other ways to highlight school spirit.

Some high schools even have a Sports Marketing team in charge of creating signage to drum up attendance at sporting events. In addition to advertising for the actual game, they also create posters and stickers that serve as advertisements for local businesses who sponsor the school. For example, a local store may pay the sports marketing group to create advertising stickers to place on water bottles.

Schools can hold scrapbooking nights where students, parents and teachers have access to the Cutout Maker’s library of shapes to create scrapbook pages. It’s an easy and fun fundraising event for schools to hold.

Help the new students find their way around the building by posting maps of the campus. Nobody wants to feel lost and rushed for time between classes! Scan and print it a copy on your Poster Maker!
Create bulletin boards that highlight afterschool and extracurricular activities the students can join like Chess Club, Tutoring, Yearbook, and Sports clubs.

A great elementary school opportunity for poster fundraisers is to sell birthday posters. Send the students home with a flyer informing the parents “Happy Birthday” posters are available to purchase for their child. The poster could be posted in the home-room, media center or cafeteria, Post the personalized poster the week of the student’s birthday and give it to them to take home at the end of the week. If you have an Awards Maker, you can quickly make a sticker for the student to wear the day of his or her birthday!

Click here for samples ideas

Click here to read the whitepaper »

The new product is the first of its kind with a regular sized chassis, but many new projectors using LED technology have been released for cell phones and so-called “pocket” projectors.

So what are the benefits? For starters, you could kiss the $200 - $500 cost of a replacement lamp goodbye along with any of the hassle of caring for it. That is good news for consumers who might have been hesitant to incur future costs after the purchase. It may also mean a dramatic increase in consumers choosing projectors as a primary display source, as the lamp life would be comparable to that of LCD and plasma TVs. Also, as we have seen with the pocket projectors, the lamp lack also allows for smaller footprints and even more portable opportunities. The fan will also not be required to cool that hot lamp, which means nearly silent operation and less energy consumption.

But wait, there’s more! With the new LED-based DLP technology, the color space possible for a projector is increased beyond that of traditional lamp’d projectors up to 50%. That’s a big benefit for the folks in the DLP camp, since color has been one area where they have been consistently challenged by 3LCD.

Are there any drawbacks to this new technology? Well for one, it’s new. So even though you won’t pay to replace the lamp, there will probably be a premium to pay initially. It’s not yet available to the general public yet, and won’t be for a while. And some reporting on the scene mention the color is not quite “lifelike” and has a bit of a red haze.

“But what about brightness?” you may ask. A good question, since previous LED projectors were in the 25 - 100 lumen range. The latest incarnation on the tradeshow floor is said to be very bright. TI claims a brightness from 500 - 1000 lumens, which was once considered a benchmark for home theater projectors. However, newer products are typically upwards of 1000 lumens. So, brightness is an issue that will probably need to improve.

But hey, nobody’s perfect on their first go. Texas Instruments says they will begin by focusing on Home Theater projection, since here is less brightness required and expects to have products released by manufacturer partners by the end of 2008. Watch us here for more updates on this potentially groundbreaking technology.

By Linda Seid Frembes, Sound and Video Contractor

Building a new school building is a daunting task for any school district, especially when the plan is for a green building project. The Sidwell Friends Middle School in Washington, D.C., opened in 2007 as a testament to the possibilities of an environmentally friendly, healthy environment for school kids. The new middle school is the secondary school in the United States to have a LEED Platinum rating and the first LEED Platinum building in the District of Columbia.

To read the complete article, click here »

Do you know the carbon footprint produced by the day to day operations of your business? Would you like to know how to reduce your impact on the environment and save money at the same time? AVI-SPL and TANDBERG have partnered to provide a handy tool to help you do just that. A new Business Advantage Calculator tool will provide you with solutions that you can use to build a business case for reducing costs, cutting CO2 emissions, and improving productivity for your organization.

Today, videoconferencing technology (VTC) is more popular than ever. It is an efficient, money-saving and environmentally-friendly technology for distance communications. TANDBERG and AVI-SPL have teamed up to help you determine the right VTC solutions for your business. click here .

For a free customized analysis, click here.

This is revolutionary. InFocus is the first projector manufacturer to bring models to market that use mini-USB to transmit video. Their new IN1100 and IN3100 series projectors feature “DisplayLink”, the technology that enables near instantaneous video connection via USB as well as multi-display capability to show multiple presentations on multiple projectors from just a single USB connection and single computer. More than that, when connected to the projector via USB, your computer can act as a fully functional projector remote control too.

Advantages of using the InFocus projector USB connection:

• Near instant recognition of video source
• No fumbling for the function key to toggle the image between PC or laptop display and the projector
• Smaller input real estate on the projector, so future projectors can continue to shrink
• Makes projector presentation setup faster and easier
• Computer becomes a projector remote control
• One USB output can power multiple projectors and presentations

InFocus projectors with the new USB video connection:

• IN1100
• IN1102
• IN3102
• IN3104
• IN3106
• Click here to see all InFocus projectors »

Previously, InFocus skipped the VGA connection in favor of the much less popular M1 connection. This new USB solution is by far their best innovation in some time.