Drones for schools: field trips, property surveys, talks, and more!
Drones can enhance all aspects of school life — and not just for the pupils! Here’s how we use them for school trips, site surveys and roof inspections, assembly presentations, and marketing.
Enriching field trips for pupils with live aerial video streams
School trips just got even more exciting! They’re already one of the most exciting ways to teach young people about science, geography, and history. Now, they can get a whole new perspective on the world around them.
We can fly our drone into the sky and set up a number of screens on the ground with a live feed of the drone’s camera! Pupils will get a ‘big picture’ view of the place where the field trip is taking place — it’s a fantastic resource for teachers.
A geography teacher could narrate the live feed, explaining the physical features of the landscape that are easier to pick out from a bird’s-eye view. History teachers can highlight the strategic layouts of ancient fortifications, and science teachers can demonstrate phenomena like the hydrological cycle.
We can mount screens like these on tripods, for pupils to gather around and watch a live feed of our drone camera while it’s in flight!
We’ve seen how excited young people get when they see drones taking off. Using them as an educational tool during school trips is an exhilarating, engaging experience.
The Solent Sky Services crew are meticulous about permissions, safety, and other legalities and precautions. We’ll liaise with school admins and the land owners of field trip destinations while writing our flight plans.
We can even provide printed materials for pupils and parents! For pupils, fact sheets about our drone equipment and how it all works. And for parents, details of our safety protocols to assure them of our professionalism and care for their children.
Planned maintenance surveys during the school holidays
Skip the scaffolding! Drone roof surveys will provide you with sharp HDR pictures and 4K or 6K videos of your school, alleviating the stresses and variables of carrying out property inspections during the off-term.
Our industry-leading image resolution and aerial camera optics capture visuals that are crisp to the centimetre and perfectly-exposed from the brightest tiles to the darkest gutters.
We can use bespoke drone surveying software Scopito to upload mapped school sites the moment we land, and our qualified, experienced surveying professionals can annotate photos or deploy them into your contractor’s auditing workflow.
Emergency surveys during term time
Drone surveys save a lot of time and money when schools are closed and pupils are off, but those benefits multiply tenfold when urgent inspections are needed while schools are running!
A wide aerial view of a school whose year-long construction project we captured at monthly intervals to document construction progress
There have been many times when we’ve received an enquiry in the morning, conducted the survey flights a few hours later, and had the full photographic map in the client’s hands by sundown.
No complicated and expensive arrangements with multiple contractors and subcontractors. No noisy disruptions to young people’s learning. No risks posed to staff and pupils by scaffolding and other cumbersome tools.
If we didn’t have to notify everyone on site of our flight plans in accordance with UAV laws, nobody would even know our aerial surveys were in progress. Sometimes, we don’t even need to be on school grounds to conduct the flights!
Safe, efficient, and very cost-effective.
Visiting schools to talk about the future of drones
Drones are becoming an integral part of every industry. They’re used to capture footage for movies and TV; to inspect properties and map historic locations; to create agricultural surveys and collect data on how we navigate cities; to deliver packages; to put out fires; to connect remote locations to the internet.
Whenever we visit schools or colleges to talk about drones, pupils and students are always captivated. They’ve perhaps seen some impressive FPV UAV videos on social media, and are amazed to learn that drones also have a hand in combatting climate change, and could soon be delivering their online orders!
We’ll tailor our presentations to any topic, and can even provide a live flight demonstration with the drone camera’s view streamed live to projector screens! This can double up as an opportunity to get an aerial photo of everyone at the school, which leads us onto...
Marketing your school with engaging drone visuals
Solent Sky Services runs a full-scale creative marketing studio, equipped to write scripts and storyboards, plan aerial and ground shoots, and edit and produce promotional videos for your school.
We can create exciting videos to captivate parents and pupils, support staff recruitment drives, and lead PR outreach to regional and national press — such as our for-broadcast shoot with HSDC college.
Our digital marketing expertise has enriched the social media feeds of clients in countless industries, including the public and private education sectors. We’re well-versed in strengthening short-term and long-term marketing campaigns.
We’ll pass our aerial photos onto your creative teams, but our in-house designers are also on hand to implement drone imagery into school brochures, parent/teacher web portals, and on-site signage.
Below is one of the 360º panoramas we’ve shot for schools: