067: Jon Bannan Associate Director of Media Technology at The College of New Jersey

I love when I get a chance to chat with some of our incredible #AVTweeps! This week, I welcome on Jon Bannan, Associate Director of Media & Technology Support Services at The College of New Jersey, located in Ewing, NJ, where he has been for over 22 years.

Jon started out working for a private IT support firm. Fast forward a couple of years, a marriage and his first child on the way and Jon made the jump into the higher ed world when the opportunity arose. When Jon started, the College had 0 technology enabled spaces installed on campus and all classroom technology was delivered by a team of 30 student workers. Since 1999, the College has implemented over 300+ tech enabled spaces and the number increases weekly.

The current A/V team is made up of 5 full time staff and 12 student technicians which are responsible for A/V design and project management of new construction/renovations, daily support of all campus spaces, academic, administrative, athletic, student spaces, annual A/V refreshes, etc. The team is also responsible for providing event A/V support for all campus and non-campus events. The team has brought the majority of integration/installation in house partnering with our campus Facilities team which has resulted in a significant cost savings and an improved end product for our end users.

Recently, the team completed an full A/V refresh of the School of Education which consisted of 35 spaces i.e. classrooms, huddle spaces, conference rooms, multi-purpose spaces, etc. using the in house A/V and Facilities team. Each classroom refresh consisted of a lamp less laser classroom projector, lamp less laser interactive projector & whiteboard, Crestron control processors, user interfaces, Wolfvision document cameras, etc. This refresh allowed TCNJ to reduce the different system interconnects from 9 to 2 which has provided an improved user experience for our faculty.

On the personal side, Jon is an avid coffee lover, huge lover of BBQ and playing with his smoker. He often spends most his free time either providing freelance monitor engineering services for production companies and artists, mixing and training church A/V teams and building / renovating some sort of project for his wife.

Connect with Jon Bannan on Twitter at @JonBannan and on LinkedIn. Learn more about The College of New Jersey on Twitter at @TCJN and online at https://www.tcnj.edu.