Marietta High School recently joined Georgia’s career preparatory education initiative, which gives students course options and tools that extend far beyond the typical public education.
The program has various career pathways that students can take, such as nursing and medicine, construction trades, digital media production, sciences, architecture, engineering, and game design Marietta High School, a Georgia College, and Career Academy, was handed a significant boost this weekend, when it announced that LG Digital Displays would help the school best prepare its students for future success.
“We are preparing each of our 2,454 students for a meaningful career aligned with career aptitudes and interests,” said Keith L. Ball, Principal of Marietta High School. “We are purposefully aligning the Career Pathway offerings to opportunities in our community and region.”
Keith Ball, Principal Marietta High School
By helping the school follow its goal to provide education and training relevant to the community’s needs and students’ interests, LG Business Solutions has installed over 80 brand-new digital displays throughout Marietta High School. These digital displays will help serve a variety of needs in the classroom and prepare students for success in the real world.
According to Keith Taylor, a member of a local AV systems integration team, the school’s new technology is comparable to a college campus.
“Georgia is focused on making its education system more workforce-oriented, and to do so, the schools need to reflect workplace realities,” said Taylor.
“This centrally-controlled display network reflects what college campuses are currently doing, and the benefits include eliminating the need for ineffective paper signage, increasing energy efficiency by enabling school-wide automation for startup and shutdown each day, and delivering more dynamic learning environments that help increase student engagement.”
Jason Meade, the Associate Principal and Career Pathways Supervisor of Marietta High expressed how spectacular these digital displays are for a high school.
“The full display network is quite a marvel for a public high school. In classrooms, the displays command higher attention and allow teachers great flexibility in lesson presentations. The game design classroom is one of the most display-heavy areas in the school, with its two separate rooms each containing three 2×2 video walls with 49-inch displays, giving instructors six 98-inch ultra-HD canvases. Having multiple video walls increases flexibility for upper-level courses that often have fewer students, and it provides additional opportunity to enhance social distancing as schools work to ensure student and staff safety.”
The biggest attractions of all are the eight 49-inch LG displays, which are mounted above doors and windows, that greet students in the main hallway.
In light of how much Covid-19 altered the traditional education model, the Director of Technology & Information Systems for Marietta City Schools, Torey Bradley, had plenty to share.
“So much about in-person experiences have changed in the last year; it’s really fortuitous that Marietta City Schools had already planned and invested in this display network,” said Bradley. “The school’s handle on technology has been instrumental to students’ continued success throughout the COVID pandemic. The college and career counselors have been able to use video collaboration services to connect with students to plan their futures, and even orchestrate Zoom-based virtual job shadowing. I imagine this is the direction all schools will go because virtual collaboration is not going to go away—in fact, it will only become more important in the future.”
Torey Bradley, Director of Technology & Information Systems (Marietta City Schools)
With many educators in agreement that this gift from LG Digital Displays will help propel the future endeavors of Marietta High School students, it will be fascinating to see how this transforms education in Marietta City Schools going forward.