Many districts have screens in hallways and classrooms, and still struggle to get the right message to the right people at the right time.In this episode of Digital Learning Today, Jeff Bradbury sits down with Kate Haddad from Rise Vision to unpack what a modern district communication system can look like when it is multi-channel but centrally managed.You will hear practical ideas for using digital signage, screen sharing, and emergency alerts to streamline everyday updates, improve consistency across campuses, and strengthen safety communications when it matters most.
Become a High-Impact Leader:
This episode is just the beginning. To get the complete blueprint for designing and implementing high-impact systems in your district, get your copy of my book, "Impact Standards."
Strategic Vision for Digital Learning:Learn how to create a district-wide vision that aligns digital learning with your educational goals, transforming how standards-based instruction is designed and supported.
Curriculum Design and Implementation:Discover practical strategies for integrating digital learning into existing curricula, creating vertical alignment of skills, and mapping digital learning across grade levels.
Effective Instructional Coaching:Master the art of coaching people rather than technology, building relationships that drive success, and measuring impact through student engagement rather than just technology usage.
Kate Haddad brings over a decade of hands-on education experience to her role as a Customer Success Manager at Rise Vision. After 10 years as a public school teacher and a few years leading district-level edtech initiatives, Kate now channels her passion for classrooms into helping schools build connected, thriving communities.
About Rise Vision
Rise Vision helps you communicate, teach, and improve safety affordably with easy cloud-based digital signage, screen sharing, and emergency alerts—all backed by world-class support and flexible hardware options.Most schools struggle to communicate effectively and keep their students engaged. Rise Vision provides an easy-to-use platform with digital signage, screen sharing, and emergency alerts to improve communication, teaching, and create a positive school culture.
Jeff Bradbury (ISTE “20 to Watch” Award Winner and ISTE Certified Educator) is available for keynote speaking, workshop facilitation, and live event broadcasting. With expertise in educational technology and professional development, Jeff brings engaging content and practical strategies to conferences and professional learning events.
My guest today is a 10-year educator and is now the customer success manager at Rise Vision, where she enjoys helping schools build connected and thriving communities. It is a pleasure today to welcome Miss Kate Haddad. Kate, how are you today? Welcome to Teacher Cast.
Kate (:
Hi, Jeff. Thanks so much for having me today. I'm excited to join you.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
It is so great to have you on here. We're wrapping up this amazing series with Rise Vision. And for those who might not have checked out our first couple episodes, talk to us a little bit about Rise Vision. What is it and what is the company doing these days to support educational classrooms?
Kate (:
Yeah, that sounds great. RiseVision is an all-in-one platform for digital signage. So we work with lots of different hardware, which is great for schools, especially that might have mix and match things on different campuses. But ultimately, we offer screen sharing for your school communication. I mean digital signage for your communication, screen sharing, which is great for collaboration within the classrooms, and then we also have emergency alerts.
So we can cover all of your campus safety as well.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Now, today we're going to be talking all about creating a system, a simple solution that's going to not only affect classrooms, buildings, but entire districts and beyond. How does RiseVision support school districts that are looking to build one single solution? I would imagine that most school districts these days have a bunch of apps that are doing everything, but Rise Vision has a different platform for this. Talk to us a little bit about how this is coming together.
Kate (:
Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of districts have, like you mentioned, a lot of different apps. But one thing that's great about Rise Vision is that it can be multi-channel but centrally managed. So what I mean by that is that you can use Rise Vision to meet all of the different needs as far as your signage, your screen sharing, those emergency alerts, all in just one platform. We also integrate well with things that districts are already using.
That's to me what sets it apart is that we can integrate with your current cap alert provider. and again, I like I mentioned earlier, we are ha hardware agnostic. So we can work with the different hardware that you already have in the schools. a lot of times there's no additional hardware needed. So it's just a great way to take everything that you currently have and create it in a system where things can be
Centrally managed but also segmented off, which makes scaling across the district really easy.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Now there's a few different places that you can go for information about Rise Vision. On our side, you can head on over to teachercast.net forward slash risevision. We're gonna make sure that we have all of our videos, our podcast recordings, all of our blog posts, all of our great rise vision content is gonna be over at teachercast.net slash rise vision. But if you also like to go directly to the company, you can go over to risevision.com. And let me ask you this here, Kate. When a school district is looking to bring this system in.
How does that usually start? Is that a principal that reaches out? Is that a tech director? Who do you guys like to have in communication and who do you guys like to have at the table when we're starting to put together a partnership here?
Kate (:
Yeah, so honestly we it can be all different kinds of scenarios. typically a teacher sometimes will hear about us or someone within the district has heard about Rise Vision or has worked with Rise Vision previously. We do also work with a lot of principals and then ultimately who we want at the table are those final decision makers, the ones who can look at our product and say, yes, this is going to work for us and now we can move forward.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
And with Europe.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
And one of the things that we wanna make sure that we have put in place are these pillars that you talk about. You know, what are some of the things that a school district needs to have ready to go and available when they're trying to implement a system like Rise Vision?
Kate (:
Yeah, so in order to implement Rise of Vision, the first thing is just taking, like I said, what you already have. So if you have classroom displays such as interactive flat panels, your hallway signage, offices, common areas, if you have displays available or even if you need displays, we can provide those as well. But ultimately, it's deciding where on campus or within the district those displays are going to be.
And then also the structure. So is this going to be a district wide rollout? and then what that looks like as far as, you know, do we want to stagger this or do we want to roll out to everyone at once? And then also just making sure if you want those cap emergency alerts that we get that all set up as well.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
For those who might not have checked out our first couple episodes, let's really talk about those emergency alerts, right? There's so many different components into that. Yet in order to create a solidified system, what should a school district be thinking about? How, like, you know, who owns each of these different pillars here between the IT department, communications, the teachers, and the office staff? How do you actually create a cohesive plan to make sure that everybody's notified when something happens?
Kate (:
Yes, absolutely. So we typically structure Rise Vision with a hierarchy for district office. And then we have the different school sites under that. So what's great with that is you can have each school site directly managing their content, but at the district level, you can also share and disseminate information across all campuses or a handful of campuses depending on the needs.
When it comes to the emergency alerts, especially if you're working with a CAP provider like Raptor, Crisis Go, there's lots of different ones. ultimately, when you send an alert through one of those cap providers, that will automatically take over all of the displays that that you have assigned in Rise Vision. The other thing you could do as well is we do have override overrides.
And what you could do in that case is each school could be creating their content. And then the district is also sharing content alongside what the schools have created. So that's another option as well.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Let me put a marker there. You doing all right so far?
Kate (:
Yeah. Am I too long winded? Okay.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
you you give me a couple of ideas for when we're finished with all this, so that's a good thing.
Now, Kate, anytime that a school district brings in a new platform, it's not just about setting it up. It's about making sure that it sustains throughout the year. And I know you've got some experience with this. Talk to us a little bit about the training process. How can school districts make sure that they're getting the most out of Rise Vision? Talk to us maybe about some of the features that a school district wants to set up first. And then how does that relationship build between RiseVision and school districts to make sure that?
The IT department knows what they're doing. Maybe the main office knows what they're doing. Communications. How does that professional learning piece of it happen?
Kate (:
Yeah, so once a district purchases Rise Vision, they get introduced to the customer success team. I am one of the customer success managers. So once I make that connection with a customer, then we work towards an onboarding plan that may look different depending on the district and how they would like to structure it. We do have some flexibility in the way that we structure the professional development for the different, you know, departments that may be managing.
So we do have some flexibility depending on what the district's end goals are. When we do the onboarding, generally it may be with IT teams first or with content creation. And when we're speaking to like the different features as we get it set up, it's incredibly easy to user I've vision. That's one of the things that sets us apart. Once you get your displays added and your content created,
The only real step that's left is to get that content scheduled onto the displays.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Take us down that step for a second, because I can imagine a a main office and a high school in a middle school. Everyone's busy. What is the actual process for putting that together? Is it simple? Is it stuff that you can set up overnight? Is it something that we can pre pro program? What does it actually take to be successful with Rise Vision?
Kate (:
Yeah, what's great with Rise Vision is we have over 700 templates that you can use. The templates are extremely easy to just open and go. Some you don't even have to edit, but you can customize them according to your needs. But what's even better is that we can also bring in any of your outside content. So I know right now Canva is so huge. When I was a teacher, yeah, I was all about Canva. And so we do have a Canva integration where you can just
Click to log in, you'll see all of your designs and bring them right in. It's the same thing with Google Slides, PowerPoint. We can also connect right to like Google Calendar or Microsoft Calendar. So the automation that we have within Rise Vision is a huge, huge plus for busy teachers because you can just set your systems up.
And they will go from there. There's not a lot of, you know, I have to hurry up and take this down because that event passed. Once you have it scheduled to expire, it will expire and erase from that schedule. And so it just makes everything so seamless.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
I want to talk a little bit about the overall process here, right? As we're sitting here looking forward to our new school year, many school districts are looking out for solutions, such as Rise Vision, but it's not going to be too long before school districts are asking what software is effective? What systems do we have that is effective? How does a school district know that their communication strategy is a full system? How do they test this?
And how do you make sure you know that when that time arises, everything is all set up and the system has worked for you?
Kate (:
Yeah, so we do a lot of testing prior to purchase as well. So they can test their system and have confidence in the product before they go through and purchase. but ultimately, once that setup is complete, you can control everything, all of those displays, all of your alerts and things like that with just a few clicks of a button. You don't have to
Go up to the displays and do things like that. You can remotely manage these. And within Rise Vision itself, you can look and you can see on every display. We give real-time screenshots so you can see what is on these displays right now at this time. And so using our different dashboards and things like that, you can also feel confident in what is showing on your displays.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
And take a pause on that. I think we hit every question, but from an educator point like what are we missing here? what what is there anything is there are there any points that you wanna hit?
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Sometimes when we do like company shows, like you forget that you're actually telling a story. Yeah. So I wanna make sure that we're hitting everything here.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
I think we hit a lot as far as the getting in, getting out. I try not to say things like by the price, but I'm gonna ask at the end, how do we contact? How do we get, you know, and and please feel free to throw that, you know, we we charge by this if you want to. Sometimes I don't even bring up prices because things change, of course. But if you say we charge by the building or I'll let you handle that one. you know, however you would do it at ISTE or anything like that. but she gave us five.
Kate (:
huh.
Kate (:
Okay.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Questions, strategy, first steps in putting things together, communication, core pillars, modern district. We pretty much got everything, right?
Kate (:
Yeah, let's maybe on that question four, can we maybe just go run through that one again?
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
In addition to or do you wanna do it in place of what we already had?
Kate (:
I think in place if that's not too
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Okay. No, no, no, no, no. I that's fine by me. let's so what's what was the question? How how do we get started? If if if the school district's looking to reach out, how do we get started? Okay. Perfect. Cause that that that'll make a good video snippet on there.
Kate (:
Yeah, like the first
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Okay, so as we go through the summertime, many school districts are gonna start to think about what that solution is for their safety and for also school districts.
One more time.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Okay, so as we're starting to think about the next phase of our school year here, many school districts are looking to figure out how to take that first step and move forward. When a school district reaches out to Rise Vision, what should they expect? Who should be on that call? And what are some of the great outcomes that we could have when we first touch base?
Kate (:
Yeah, so that first first touch base is going I'm sorry, can we redo that?
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Did I say that wrong?
Kate (:
so on on this question, can we focus this on the realistic first steps for districts that want to modernize? Yeah.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Modernize. Okay. What does that mean? I I was trying to figure out the def like how that was being used.
Kate (:
Yeah, so sometimes districts will be using like old tools or old methods or physical methods where they have to approach, you know, their displays and use like a USB or something like that. And so we want to focus this on that they can consolidate, they can use their existing stuff and just really streamline the process.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Awesome, that makes a lot of sense. Okay.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Kate, you know, many school districts that are looking to bring Rise Vision in might be worried, especially over the summertime, that their existing infrastructure is not up to date. For any school district looking to partner with Rise Vision and worried about modernization of equipment, what advice do you have for them?
Kate (:
Yeah, advice would be to first start with your existing displays. What hardware do you have? This could consist of lots of different things, like your classroom hardware, your, you know, what's in your hallways, what's in your office. And there it there may not be consistency there, and that's okay. but ultimately you want to be able to consolidate your tools and roll out to a few schools first. So
Whether that be a staggered rollout or if you want to roll out to the entire district, that can that can all be possible. But ultimately, what's important is that you are starting with what you already have and then you are moving from that to a way that you can centrally control everything and just make this an extremely straightforward process where you can streamline all your different processes.
To make the digital signage work for you.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
You wanna try that one loft? Okay.
Kate (:
Yeah, that was so terrible.
Honestly, the first one we did was probably the best.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
Why don't we I kind of liked how my question was. So let me let me let me keep that spot. I'm gonna put another marker here. Take a deep breath. Try it again. Give me a couple seconds of of time on either side so I can make the cut. But
How can we do h what can we do about modernization?
Kate (:
So the first thing you want to do is start with your existing displays. So what do you currently have on your campus? And if those are mismatched, so you have different hardware everywhere, that is definitely okay. But ultimately, the goal to modernize your digital signage is moving away from systems that are more manual and moving to systems that are more automatic, which is where Rise Vision comes in. You want to be able to
Have everything streamlined and easy for you so that you can really automate these things and take the load off of your staff that's already overburdened. And so Rise Vision being all in one really makes it easy to streamline that process.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
So Kate, the great thing here is no matter where a school district currently is, no matter what the hardware is, no matter what kind of boards are currently in classrooms, now is the best time to reach out and start a conversation with Rise Vision. Where can they do that and how can they get started?
Kate (:
Yes, you can go right to risevision.com. There we have our pricing, we have transparent pricing, we have all of the different details of our products. You can also reach out directly to our sales team at sales at risevision.com.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
I encourage you guys to check out all the great things happening over at Risevision.com. And of course, if you're looking to find all of our RiseVision content, you can head on over to teachercast.net forward slash rise vision. That's teachercast.net forward slash rise vision. Kate, one more time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. It has not only been a great opportunity to have you on the show, but to have Rise Vision on our entire summer podcasting series. Hope you guys have a chance to check that out and check everything out over on our YouTube channel. Kate, thank you so much for your time today.
Kate (:
Awesome. Thank you so much, Jeff. It's been a pleasure.
Jeffrey Bradbury (:
And that wraps up this episode of digital learning today. If you haven't had a chance to check out everything over at Teacher Cast, head on over there for all of our instructional coaching needs. Our AI section is booming each and every week, adding more great things. And of course, one last time, check out everything over at teachercast.net slash rise vision today. And that wraps up this episode on behalf of RiseVision and everybody here on Teacher Cast. My name is Jeff Bradbury, reminding you guys to keep up the great work in your classrooms and continue sharing your passions with your students.
