Setting up a display panel for a lobby or a corridor

A display panel is a web page to load full screen in a browser, on a TV set, a monitor or a tablet, to broadcast the day's lessons and events to the school's public. It is the module to use for a welcome screen, a screen in a corridor, outside a laboratory or facing a lecture hall: the content depends only on what you filter, not on where the screen is placed. You can create as many panels as you want, each with its own filter and its own access URL.

Creating a new panel

In the Timetable module, the Display panel button opens the configuration screen. The list on the left shows the existing panels; the (green) Add button creates a new empty panel. You can also duplicate an existing panel with Duplicate, which is faster if you manage a fleet of screens sharing the same branding.

Each panel carries a Label, to find it in the list, and a Title, displayed at the top of the public screen. The two can differ: Main lobby — campus A on the administration side, Welcome to School X — campus A on the screen side.

Filtering the displayed lessons

The main filter — the Show property — chooses what goes on screen. Four complementary axes:

• Levels — all the classes of one level at once (for example all the Grade 6 classes).
• Classes — explicit selection of one or more classes.
• Sites — all the rooms of one site (useful for a screen placed in the lobby of a specific site).
• Classrooms — explicit selection of one or more rooms (useful for a panel covering a building wing).

An empty filter = all lessons. That is the right default for a central lobby screen that has to show what is happening everywhere in the school.

A second list — Hide — lets you exclude specific lessons from the retained stream:

• Subjects to hide (for example not displaying physical education if it takes place far from the main building),
• Lesson types to hide (for example hiding exams that must not be announced to the public).

Filter and mask combine: everything that matches the filter is kept, then everything that matches the mask is removed.

Setting the displayed time range

The Time slot property controls how far ahead the panel shows lessons:

• End of the day (default) — scrolls through today's current and upcoming lessons (the current lesson stays displayed until its end time). Appropriate for a screen that serves all day long.
• sliding window — in 30 min steps up to + 2 h, then by full hour up to + 12 h. The panel only shows what starts within the window chosen from the current time. Useful for a very busy lobby screen where you want to avoid a wall of information: showing only the next two hours, for example.

Refreshing is automatic on the browser side, without manual reloading; as the current time moves forward, past lessons leave the window and the next ones enter it.

Adding temporary messages

The Information section lets you display one or more text messages on the panel, each with its own time range. Typical cases:

• announcing an event (Parent-teacher meeting in room B204 at 5:30 pm),
• warning about a disruption (Building work in the south wing, access through the rear entrance),
• broadcasting a welcome message (Welcome to the open day).

Each message carries free text, a start time and an end time. Outside this range, the message disappears automatically — you do not have to come back and remove it afterwards.

Getting the panel's public URL

Once saved, each panel has a unique URL to open full screen on the target device. The URL contains a secret hash that grants access without signing in — this is what allows an unauthenticated TV set to display the content. As long as the hash is not shared publicly, the panel is not accessible.

Good practice: open this URL in a browser in full-screen kiosk mode (Chrome --kiosk, Firefox F11), preferably on a mini PC or a signage box attached to the screen. The browser handles refreshing and scrolling on its own.