TalkingPoints is Compass' digital signage option, a way to communicate important and timely information to your school community. TalkingPoints integrates into Compass by taking selected News Feed items, along with your daily organisation information (such as Cancellation and Room Changes) and displays them on any HDMI-enabled screen (such as a television or projector) anywhere you like in the school.

Aside from the daily organisation data that is automatically displayed from either your timetable data or the Daily Organisation page on Compass, exactly what the TalkingPoints device displays is up to you. Once the TalkingPoints module is enabled, a new option will appear when editing or publishing News Feed items, seen below:

Once set up, simply tick the 'Publish' tick box and select whether or not to show the images in full screen or not, if you've attached images. Once saved the News Feed item will then be pushed out to the TalkingPoints device/s at the school. TalkingPoints device/s support both text and images, so it's an excellent way to share important announcements, as well as showcase the achievements of groups or students from within the school.

When you receive your TalkingPoints, each package will include the following items for each device purchased:

Simply plug the black USB lead into a standard 5v power supply (AC Adaptor Included, but most modern TV's have USB ports as well) to power the device. It will turn itself on automatically. Once this is done, plug the network lead into the port on the left of the device until it clicks. This will provide network connectivity for the device to communicate with Compass. Finally, plug the HDMI cable into the device and the other end into the TV. This will send the image signal to the television. Once set up, the device should look like the below.

Once you have setup your TalkingPoints device/s you can start displaying information on the screen/s you have connected them to.

To add a message or image to the screen go to your homepage on Compass and create a new News Feed post by clicking the green plus (+) symbol.

Add a title, set the start and expiry dates, add any text content to the large box on the left, and add any images as attachments at the bottom. In order to display this information on the screens connected to TalkingPoints, tick the box next to 'Publish' under the TalkingPoints Digital Signage section (highlighted in red below). If you want the images to take up the entire screen select the tick box next to 'Show images in full screen'.

Once you click the 'Save' button at the bottom of the page this will appear on all of your TalkingPoints screens throughout the school. Please note you can also publish previously created News Feed Items by editing them and clicking the Publish button and resaving them.

All published items will continue to display on the screens and remain in the rotation until they expire based on the 'Expiry Date' as set when the News Feed Item was created, regardless of the internet connectivity status of the device. This ensures that even during a network outage, the device still displays timely and relevant information.
Once published items will display on the screen for 10 seconds. The Daily Organisation changes to the timetable - including room changes, teacher changes and cancellations - will display for 15 seconds, allowing staff and students a little more time to read this detailed information.

Any user who has the ability to post to the News Feed will be able to post a News Feed item to TalkingPoints. So any staff member with the permission NewsFeedPower or NewsFeedAdmin will be able to post to the screens.

The three dots in the top right of the screen are indicators of any issues that may be occurring with the TalkingPoints device/s.

TalkingPoints requires an unrestricted connection to Compass servers. Most of the work is done via port 80 and 443, but some traffic on other ports is sometimes necessary for remote access, updates and extended functionality. For this reason, we cannot provide a list of all ports that TalkingPoints uses to communicate for whitelisting purposes.

TalkingPoints has been designed to be resilient to temporary network outages. TalkingPoints caches all items it displays, including images, text and class changes. This means that even if your network collapses or the internet goes out, TalkingPoints will continue to display information until the cache is purged during it's next restart.

This doesn't mean that the TalkingPoints will continually display old information, it's been designed to keep track of when a given News Feed post should expire, and will not display expired items. However, sometimes this process may go awry if the device has had it's connection interrupted momentarily, and old News Feed items may display when they shouldn't.

To fix this, simply restart the device by disconnecting and reconnecting the power to purge the device and force it to re-download relevant News Feed items and rebuild it's cache.

The TalkingPoints device has been designed to work on a number of televisions and screens, across many different types of resolutions. Generally the device does a fantastic job of displaying information on any screen it is plugged into, but with so many different screens available on the market this process is not always perfect.

If you are having any issues with the way the device is displaying or formatting text, images or daily organisation changes please send a photograph or screenshot to support@compass.edu.au so we can determine exactly what is causing the issues and work with you to resolve it so you receive the best possible TalkingPoints experience for your situation.