Atlona, a Panduit company, has partnered with Lightspeed to promote professional classroom AV solutions for K-12 applications. The partnership will allow both companies to design integrated solutions that address the unique challenges of hybrid learning environments, while strengthening audio and video capabilities for educators inside classrooms and throughout school buildings.
Atlona and Lightspeed are both leading suppliers of classroom AV technology. The Omega Series from Atlona is a family of switching, extension, and video processing solutions with features and technologies specifically designed for today’s educational spaces. Lightspeed instructional audio systems engage the whole classroom, ensuring every student can clearly hear through low-volume, highly intelligible sound that is evenly distributed through the classroom.
The partnership will expose both firm’s customers to a range of solutions that span across all school budgets, from standard set-ups to more advanced classrooms with video conferencing capabilities. Regardless of scale, the partnership will bring together independent Atlona and Lightspeed products to serve a common purpose. This will provide integrators and IT departments with affordable and flexible options for streamlined educational AV systems.
“Current learning trends have created a greater reliance on professional AV technology inside the classroom, with accelerated adoption of PTZ cameras, signal extension, and soft codec conferencing systems that have required schools adapt to new hybrid learning strategies,” said Roger Takacs, Strategic Account Manager, Atlona. “Partnering with Lightspeed will help our integrators enhance voice clarity as part of the Atlona ecosystem, leveraging microphones and other instructional audio products from an expert focused on innovation for K-12 schools.”
Shaun Fagan, Vice President of Product Development for Lightspeed, emphasizes that working with Atlona will immediately address the new challenges that teachers face when providing instruction to students online and in the classroom at once. “Consider the barriers teachers already face with effective classroom communication, and then consider how these challenges are amplified though a global pandemic,” said Shaun. “Students at home need to clearly hear the lesson, plus intelligibility, clarity and loudness is reduced further when the teacher is speaking through a mask. By providing teachers with an easy-to-use pendant microphone, we have raised that clarity and audibility both within the classroom and for distance learners.”
Takacs sees plenty of opportunity to scale deployments to serve multiple end points or zones in a school moving forward. “Our Omega switchers will provide immediate improvement in single-classroom hybrid learning solutions, from USB signal extension to soft codec conferencing,” he said. “We also see opportunities to feed video and audio to multiple displays in enhanced classrooms using our OmniStream AV over IP products, or even broadcast guest speakers and events over a school’s IP network. In the latter example, Lightspeed microphones would capture the presenter, with OmniStream distributing the audio and associated video throughout the entire school. We see many options to tailor and grow our integrated solutions as schools resume more traditional schedules.”
Shaun adds that Lightspeed’s instructional audio systems seamlessly integrate with Atlona switching, distribution, and extension solutions, while ensuring that both the teacher’s voice and program audio are heard clearly by all students in the classroom.
