The time has finally arrived for our district to put away the 32" Zenith monster TV's that have been hanging lifeless in the corners of classrooms for the last 20 years...we're onto bigger and better things with Safari Montage!
Safari Montage is a video distribution and creation system. In addition to the continually updated bank of videos Safari offers, we have the Creation Station piece which will allow us to upload videos we create, documents, and SMART Notebook files to share with one another...on our own campus and across the district!
Any material a teacher uploads through Creation Station can be selected to be available on Home Access, meaning that students can access these creations at home. Home Access automatically makes Safari video content available.
Safari has an Online Community (Safari Montage HD Network) where teachers can share content, get ideas, seek assistance from teachers all over the country, and win awesome prizes (hello, iPad!) for submission ideas.
Many of the videos include Teacher guides, Blackline Masters, and Quizzes (around 5 questions) that complement the video content. Many of the videos have English and Spanish language tracks as well as Closed Captioning which is great for ELLs.
All videos are broken into "Chapters" that are around 2-7 minutes. Safari encourages teachers to use these Chapters to cover only what is needed out of the videos to meet the immediate objective of the current lesson. Each Chapter is further divided into "key concepts" that are typically less than 1 minute long!
Teachers can create Playlists to help organize their classes, content areas, and lesson objectives. Safari playlists can consist of Chapters from various videos for a particular lesson. Playlists can be shared within a campus or within the district. If sharing a playlist, discussion about naming the playlists needs to take place(including the TEKS, grade level, subject, etc.). Playlists can be played in "automatic" (plays all videos, in order, back to back) or "manual" mode. Manual plays the video, then at the end of that video it will stop and show a "next" button, so that when the teacher is ready to proceed with the next video, they can move on at their own pace of instruction. Playlists can also be connected to Eduphoria (Forethought) through the "permanent link" button. Using the "copy" feature can help teachers differentiate by adding or taking out clips for a particular group of students. Teachers can add a quiz to a particular Playlist.
http://www.safari.coppellisd.com/ is the intra-site address. Teachers in CISD can use their network username and password.
No comments:
Post a Comment