I’ve been designing and integrating AV systems for schools for a long time now. Long enough to have seen every wave of “this changes everything” come through, and long enough to know that the technology that actually changes a school is rarely the most impressive thing on the showroom floor.

I was at ISE in Barcelona earlier this year. Integrated Systems Europe, the world’s biggest
professional AV and systems integration trade show. Thousands of exhibitors. Every major manufacturer showing their latest. And after walking those halls for days, my takeaway wasn’t about any single product. It was about the gap between what’s possible and what’s actually reliable in a school.

That gap is real. The tools have never been more powerful. But if you walk into most schools
today, you’ll still find IT managers and teachers not using any of the tools now available to them, and the IT manager pushing teachers to use Microsoft 365 tools for everything so they can manage as few support tickets as possible.

Take AI as an example. It gets a lot of airtime in education right now, and rightly so. But the
conversation tends to jump straight to what students can do with it, rightly or wrongly, and how the school will block it, skipping over what it means for how schools are designed, managed, and supported. AI-assisted monitoring, predictive maintenance, space analytics. These aren’t science fiction anymore. They’re tools that can help a school’s technology actually hold up over time, not just on installation day.

What excites me most, though, is the shift toward purposeful standardisation. When every
room on a campus behaves the same way, same interface, same logic, same experience,
teachers stop thinking as much about the technology and start thinking about how they’ll use it in their lesson. That’s the goal. Technology then disappears into the background, and we can start thinking about the students, because if we forget about them, we’ve missed the point.

The other big shift is connectivity. As schools expand into more buildings and more campuses, the communications and AV infrastructure underneath everything becomes genuinely critical.
It’s not just about screens and speakers. It’s about whether a school can communicate, in any condition, at any time. This was happening five years ago, but the actual gap from then to now in schools is closing.

Ultimately, the opportunity for schools right now is to stop buying technology reactively and start designing it intentionally. Think about what the room needs to do in three to five years, not just tomorrow. Design with standards across the campus. Design for the teacher. And make sure someone’s got your back when something goes wrong. That’s not just a tech decision. That’s a leadership one.

About The Big Picture Group

Founded by brothers Mark and Chris Skehan, The Big Picture delivers integrated audio-visual, telecommunications and civil solutions across Queensland. From immersive AV installations in classrooms and corporate environments to fibre hauling, 5G infrastructure and small-scale civil works including hydro excavation and ACM pit replacements, they help organisations communicate, connect and operate more effectively. With teams in Cairns, Rockhampton and South East Queensland, they combine technical expertise with a commitment to safety, precision and lasting impact — because great technology should do more than function; it should help you tell your story.