point2explore - Exhibit Multimedia Blog

Kiosks That Work - Touch Screen Events Calendar

kiosk calendar touch screen calendar touch screen kiosk

Nov 01 2011

Touch screen kiosks can be used to educate visitors in many ways but beyond offering information on your exhibits or the subject matter in your displays, you can offer additional information that can be useful for awareness and promotion. Consider an events calendar.

Most museums conduct events, classes, tours, or other scheduled offerings like movies. And most of these museums work hard to create awareness and promote these opportunities. One highly effective and cost effective way is to maintain a calendar and make it available. Printing is fine, but what about those late changes or unexpected opportunities that don't make the print deadline? Electronic calendars solve this problem. There are a number of online calendar applications and calendar programs that can be used in a kiosk, but there are a number of things you should keep in mind.

1. Is the calendar program easy to maintain by a number of people? This can make or break this initiative because if its not maintained, it's useless.

2. Can the calendar be made available on your web site, on kiosks, or even in a print version? If no one sees it, it's of no use.

3. Can you add additional information to an event like directions or links to registration?

4. Can you preset recurring events easily?

5. Can you protect access to the administration of the calendar?

The online use of a calendar is the easy part. Using an online calendar application like Google Calendar makes it easy to link or embed a calendar to any web site. The trickier application is the kiosk usage. If your kiosk has internet access you can simply give access to the calendar application in a web browser, but the problem could be that a user can navigate away from that calendar to other sites of their choice or even worse, close the browser and gain access to the computer. To protect from these things, kiosk web browser software is available. This can be tricky to set up but well worth the effort.

At point2explore, we offer a touch screen kiosk program designed to use Google Calendar and make it easy to use on a kiosk. Event Viewer 2.0 makes it easy to use Google Calendar to maintain your calendar and draws that data automatically into the kiosk program. Event Viewer is designed for touch screen use with large buttons for fingers and protection from malicious acts. Event Viewer is available as a stand alone program or as an add on to our other touch screen educational games and informational programs.

Chris Meyer

President

CD Meyer, Inc./point2explore

point2explore is product line of customizable touch screen kiosk programs including interactive games and informational programs. point2explore products are currently running in over 100 museums and have been used in corporate events across the country. Visit our web site at www.point2explore.com.

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