Lampasas Independent School District (Lampasas ISD) has selected SAFARI Montage to manage, create and distribute digital media throughout the district’s five campuses. Lampasas ISD, a small community located near Austin, TX, serves 3,350 students from grades Pre-K to 12.
SAFARI Montage both facilitates visual instruction in the classroom and connects teachers, students and parents to the district’s content from home.
“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 Eric Folks, Instructional Technology Coordinator at Lampasas ISD."Our teachers are thrilled with their ability to access and play relevant content quickly, easily and reliably.”
The SAFARI Montage user interface allows teachers to search for media by keyword, grade range, file type and other criteria, bookmark clips, create playlists and organize folders that can be shared with the school and/or district.
“I use SAFARI Montage to quickly find relevant video clips to support instruction in physics and chemistry,” said Ruth Henson, a physics and pre-AP chemistry teacher at Lampasas High School. “There is no downloading, no library to visit, no hoping the video is available and no hours of watching irrelevant footage. The system allows me to create a playlist that I can open and play at the exact time I need it without worrying about ‘techno-failure.’”
Along with the SAFARI Montage Video-On-Demand system and educational content, the district uses SAFARI Montage CreationStation® to add, share and manage student- and teacher-created video content, as well as licensed programming. Once uploaded, the content can be meta-tagged with segment descriptions and marked for home access. Additionally, with the SAFARI Montage MHA H.264 Converter, Lampasas ISD is able to automatically convert video uploaded via CreationStation to the standard MHA-playable format -- “a feature that works great and saves the district a great amount of time,” according to Mr. Folks.
