Safari Montage

This week will serve as a “head up” of a new program the district has purchased for us called Safari Montage. As the second part of the name suggests, Safari Montage is a mosaic of digital learning tools for teachers to use with their students. Safari Montage is a place for educators and students to create, store and present digital learning resources in K-12 teaching and learning. So you are probably asking about now, what does that mean? Safari Montage is a combination of four digital platforms. The one, I see teachers being most excited about is the video streaming library. Safari Montage will be replacing our Discovery Education subscription. Safari Montage has over 10,000 videos and 17,000 images at your disposal. You can search video content by state and Common Core standards. The titles cover Social Studies, Science, Language Arts, Math, Foreign Language, and Health & Physical Education. There are also videos on Character Education, Computer Science and lots more subjects. You may be familiar with some of the companies that house their movies on Safari Montage: Reading Rainbow, Schoolhouse Rock, Eyes of the Prize, PBS, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Magic School Bus, Sid the Science Kid, Modern Marvels, Schlessinger Media, SciGirls, Between the Lions, The Men who Built America, The History Channel, BBC, National Geographic, plus MANY more. The filtering system within the video streaming component allows you to search by grade level and video type. Each video is divided up into smaller segments so you have the option of showing the whole video or only parts that are relevant to what you are teaching. To learn more about video streaming using Safari Montage, click on the following link. http://www.safarimontage.com/solutions/video-streaming-library.aspx

Safari Montage also has a Learning Object Repository (LOR). That means you can upload over 50 types of digital resources file types whether they are Microsoft Office files, Apple files, ebooks, videos, interactive whiteboard files, interactive files such as Google Earth and images such as JPEG, GIF, PNG or Bitmap. You can group these resources by subject and place them in folders you create. The Learning Object Repository allows teachers to share playlists they have created for certain teaching units and use playlists created by other teachers. Playlists are groups of media that teachers put together to guide students through interactive lessons. Playlists can be given a QR code or web link so students can access them through the lab computers or at home. For more information on the Learning Object Repository (LOR), click on the following link. http://www.safarimontage.com/solutions/learning-object-repository.aspx

Rest assured, training on Safari Montage is coming. If anyone wants to explore the program on their own and start using the videos in their classroom, please do. Both Sue W. and I were introduced to the program and are happy to answer any questions you have or show you how to search for media. The link to the log-in page is below. The user name is the same school email address you log-in with every morning and the password is the same one you use every morning as well. The link only works from school. Mark B. is in the process of developing a separate link that will eventually work from home.

http://safari.merrimack.k12.nh.us/SAFARI/montage/login/login.php?