Texas System Delivers VOD District-wide
Lampasas Independent School District has moved to a WAN-based video on demand system to deliver multimedia educational materials to its classrooms. The school system recently deployed Safari Montage district-wide to distribute, manage, and create visual learning aids.
"Safari Montage has helped to meet the district's needs for visual instruction without burdening the school's Internet bandwidth--something we've struggled with before," said Instructional Technology Coordinator Eric Folks in a prepared statement. "Our teachers are thrilled with their ability to access and play relevant content quickly, easily and reliably."
Safari Montage is a VOD and digital media management system designed specifically for schools. It includes educational videos, tools for creating and adding content, and a WAN manager for cross-site media distribution.
In addition tot he core solution, the district has implemented the Safari Creation Station module, which allows user-created digital media and licensed programming to be added to the Safari Montage system.
Lampasas Independent School District in Texas serves 3,350 students in one high school, one middle school, and three elementary schools.
In related news, Safari Montage has unveiled a new software module that allows up to 40 media formats to be added to lessons plans and played on a single interface.
The new module, Digital Curriculum Presenter, offers quick access to media files, video conferencing, live streams of camera or DTV, support for interactive whiteboards, and Web-based assessment.
To organize media files and make them accessible, the module uses a teacher view menu that displays media files as thumbnails and features control of the integrated media player. In addition to media controls, the teacher view menu allows access to the course repository and teacher resources, which include key vocabulary, handouts, and quizzes.
A digital curriculum developer is included to enable educators to create lesson plans and edit both the scope and sequence of digital curriculum. Features include digital rights management, the ability to import formative assessments questions, and the ability to import Safari Montage resources.
For formative assessment, the Digital Curriculum Presenter platform offers Get it, a Web-based tool that connects with Android devices, iPhones, and iPads. The tool uses live data, records assessment results, offers the ability to notify parents of the results, and allows both images and video to be integrated as a part of the assessment.
Further information about Digital Curriculum Presenter can be found here.
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Dan Thompson is a freelance writer based in Brea, CA. He can be reached here.