Two-way radios have long been a part of school communication systems. Despite the rise of smartphones, radios are still a vital tool in schools because of their ease of use, reliability and instant push-to-talk communication.
The new Tait TP3 was designed with features that are perfect for schools. In this article, we’ll explore the top 7 of those features.
1) Show off your School Spirit
Having great school spirit is part of what makes school a memorable experience for students. Universities and high schools are often known by their mascot and school colors.
When most people think of a radio, they think of a plain, black device. This is great if you belong to a school whose mascot is the Black Knights, but what if you’re the Green Hornets, or Red Dragons, or Yellow Jackets? You used to be stuck with a black radio, but not anymore!
The TP3 offers a wide variety of ways to show off your school spirit. First, you can choose a cover that matches your school.
Not only that, but customizable labels give schools another chance to show off school spirit. Labels can be printed in full color and feature anything – including your school’s logo, name, or mascot. You can also use labels to identify the owner of the radio or which talk group it belongs to.
Finally, you can also show off your school spirit with the customizable color splash screen. Every time a user turns on the radio, they can be greeted by your school logo or any other message or image you want them to see.
Your logo, your mascot, your team jerseys, your colors, and your signage all show off school spirit. Why not your radios too?
2) Enhanced security and safety
School security and student safety is a top priority in schools all over the world. Should an emergency occur, whether caused by a human or from a natural disaster, communication is vital for school safety.
Tait radios are built to work in emergency situations. They’re rugged and reliable, and they allow users to communicate with their eyes up. Should there ever be a violent attack on the school for instance, you don’t want to be looking down at your phone to unlock it, close the previous app, find the right contact, and make the call. You want to press a single button that you can find without looking, and be connected instantly to the rest of your team.
Simplex communication allows you to communicate with other faculty members, even when the communication network or power has gone down. Each radio can speak to the other radios close by, so you’re not reliant on a cellular network to remain stable during an emergency.
Several safety features are also available. For instance, the TP3350 includes man down alerts – should someone on your team fall or collapse, you’ll receive an emergency alert. GPS also allows you to monitor everyone’s location. Vibration alerts help ensures users do not miss calls.
Without communications, you operate blind during emergency situations. For enhanced school security and safety, choose the Tait TP3.
3) Improve Efficiency
Radios keep schools operating at an efficient pace. Classroom time is important for students and teachers alike, you don’t want anything to take away from that. The TP3 provides instant connectivity between administrators, maintenance crews, traffic directors, resource officers, and anyone else who needs to be connected.
Few things are more frustrating than trying to get in touch with a faculty member when comms are not working. Need to notify the facilities team that there is a clean-up required in the restroom? It’s much easier to press a single button than to walk across the school, only to find they aren’t in their office.
If you choose to take advantage of location services, you can create even more efficiencies. Need to send someone to the football field? Use the GPS data to see who is closest. Need to know where a school bus is? Check with your location services application.
4) Flexible Future
Suppose you want to save costs, so you purchase radios without a color screen. But after your school adds a few more classrooms or decides to partner with the neighboring middle school for comms, you realize you need more keys and a screen to select channels and use text messaging. With competitor radios, you’ll need to buy an entire new device.
But with the TP3, that change is easy. You simply work with your dealer to apply new covers, and you can go from a no-key, no-display radio to a 4-key or 16-key radio with display. And of course, every cover type comes in all our colors!
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With the TP3, you can protect your investment today by choosing a radio that is flexible and ready to meet your changing needs of the future.
5) Open Standards
Speaking of flexibility, Tait has a philosophy to make radios that adhere to open standards.
What does this mean for your school? It means that if you buy Tait today, you won’t be forced to buy Tait in the future. Our radios will work with other radios and communication devices that follow open standards. You can connect our radios with applications like voice recorders, online management tools, or dispatch.
While some vendors try to lock-you-in to their offering by selling features on radios that don’t work with others, you won’t fall into that trap with Tait. We simply believe that customers deserve the right to choose what’s best for them, and that competition pushes vendors to keep innovating.
6) Part of an entire communications solution
While a TP3 radio alone may be enough for some smaller schools, others will require a full communications solution. Fortunately, Tait can design and deliver everything you need.
If you need a base station (also known as a repeater) to create a network, we’ve got the Tait TB7300. Need some mobile radios to place in your school buses? We’ve got the Tait TM9300 and Tait Unified Vehicle. Want a console to manage and monitor your team? Check out the Omnitronics ReadyTalk Flex-Lite solution that enables location tracking and other great features.
All this hardware unlocks many new applications for schools as well. For instance, a custom Tait Unified Vehicle application allows school buses to automatically track when and where they make each stop. This way, if a parent or student claims the bus never came for them, the school has a record of the time and place the bus did, in fact, stop.
Another great application for schools is Tait TeamPTT. This smartphone application connects people to their radio network, via the internet and an app on their phone. You may not be able to give every teacher a radio, but what if every teacher had the Tait TeamPTT app on their existing cellular device? They could make calls, hear alerts, view the location of other users, and stay much more connected to administration during regular operating hours and emergencies.
7) Value for Money
Funding is always going to be a limited resource, and so schools need to be conscious of spending their budgets wisely, getting the best value they can. On paper, some of the low-cost solutions out there may seem appropriate. However more often than not, they turn out to be a false economy, resulting in poor performance and a route to unforeseen risks and dangers. There is a big difference between getting something cheap and getting something with value.
Tait TP3 has a range of high-quality features, is reliable and durable, and offers you flexibility, all for a very affordable price. This value-packed portable is an obvious choice for your school communications.
Want to Learn More?
If you’re interested in learning more about the Tait TP3, be sure to visit our TP3 webpage or contact us with your questions or estimate requests.
