Today, wrapping up an exciting week in Toronto and Mississauga, Canada, for our annual FrontRow International Sales Summit, it is not the unexpected snow, chilly rain or wind gusts that have my attention. I am struck by the enormity and purpose of Toronto’s CN Tower and drawing unexpected parallels between it and our work in education.
The CN Tower is Toronto’s most familiar attraction. Standing at 553 meters high (1,815 feet), it is visible from almost any vantage point downtown. To put it into perspective, the Eiffel Tower is 324 meters high (1,063 ft). By the late sixties and early seventies, as the tall buildings in Toronto’s downtown were obstructing communication signals, a tower with great height was needed and the CN Tower was built to accommodate the city’s communication needs.
Since its construction began in 1973, it has become more than a communication hub; it has incorporated many features that make it an excellent tourist destination, including a restaurant, an observation deck and a hands-free skywalk.
FrontRow’s beginnings date to 1963, just one decade before the CN Tower construction began. And, like the CN Tower, we serve broad communication needs, not of a city, but of all students and school staff everywhere.
Since 1963, FrontRow has become a daily key feature of over 15,000 schools globally, providing classroom sound systems to overcome a problem most people aren’t even aware of — that 25% of what the teacher says in class never reaches students’ brains because they cannot properly hear the content being delivered. In the back of the classroom, the amount of missing information approaches 40%.
Toronto has the CN Tower and FrontRow has Juno, a tower that allows for obstruction-free communication in learning spaces and is much shorter—just 27 inches tall; 35 inches, if you include the base. Just like the CN Tower delights its visitors with a multi-functional design, Juno delights instructors and students with a multi-functional teacher microphone, an all-in-one speaker tower that spreads voice and media audio throughout the learning space, and either physical or voice control of sources, so they can hear and communicate clearly from virtually any corner of a classroom.
Next time you are in Toronto, be sure to visit its CN Tower. Next time you are considering taking your school and its students to the next level, think of Juno, our tower.
