Introduction

Greetings fellow peers of the Audio-Visual domain, and welcome to another year of our Classroom Summit for educational institutions in North Carolina. We wanted to take a moment to let you know what our Classroom Summit is all about and what we hope to achieve with our yearly meeting.

Our History

Originally the Classroom Summit started as an offshoot of the Carolina Cause event, where those of us who specialized in AV felt there needed to be a more Audio-Visual centralized focus on our respective tech fields. It was with that we elected to start a separate gathering where all things AV were to be the focus over our two days together. We decided to rotate the event location between the Mountain, Central, and Coastal regions of the state on an annual basis, reducing the travel burden for attendees, and allowing them once every third year to not have to travel far in the state to attend. We also schedule the two days in a manner that is designed with minimal disruption to your regular work schedules. As part of this, and another difference between us and UNC Cause, we choose not to have the presence of manufacturers and vendors, so that we can focus on the trade of ideas and approaches to AV in our schools. This event is for exposure to methods and administrative tools that make the job less stressful, saving on budgets. And best yet, creating valuable relationships within the great AV community that our schools all have.

Our Goals

We have purposely created this event in a way that we can focus on the transfer and sharing of learned knowledge and experience within the educational institutions of North Carolina that benefits all to know. Be it using or creating State contracts for vendors and resellers to agree to. All for the purpose of saving money and time on our projects.  Then there are the areas of sharing learned knowledge some have encountered, both good and bad, such as implementing Disaster Recovery plans, or the sharing of opinions and reviews of vendors and manufacturers. Along with many subjects of importance to you, your staff and administration. 

The amount of well-earned experience by many of our peers is valuable to your respective school in that one can learn ways to speed up projects and lower budgets. Learning new room designs, new technologies, and how some schools with big budgets do things, and more importantly, how those with smaller budgets accomplish much the same thing in their rooms that the bigger schools do. At our Summit, the host school will have a walking tour of the spaces to show how they have designed for AV in their conference rooms, classrooms, simulation rooms, and recreational areas such as gaming and Esports arenas. We believe in sharing knowledge, experiences, and best practices that can lead to more efficient and cost-effective projects.

Your Career in AV

We also as a group, hope to use the Classroom Summit to build up the image of Audio-Visual Techs and Engineers in the state education system to be better recognized as a separate entity from that of IT, as the two fields have their differences and pay scales. One goal is to get the State to create job branding titles specific to AV and those who work in its disciplines. There is and can be a large gap in salary at the state level versus that of the private sector, which at times makes it hard to retain a strong staff. So here too is an area we hope to influence over time to provide our school administrations with a better idea of who we are and what we do as Audio-Visual technicians and engineers.  It all begins with you, us, in learning how to advance your career in AV and make your team better understood and recognized by the school.  

In Summary

To wrap up, the Classroom Summit is all about YOU! A gathering where you are not being distracted by sales pitches and are instead able to focus on subjects of interest to you. The Classroom Summit is not a trade show. It is a learning event that benefits us all in our field of AV, with presenters giving recent experiences in the past year learned, or in the breakout sessions, based on us all selecting some subjects that are not already on the agenda. And best yet, the socializing we do during the day and at the evening dinner, where new relationships are made, and new friends are found. We look forward to seeing you again, and if it is for the first time, we especially look forward to meeting you, your knowledge, and your questions. Here is to a great Classroom Summit!