Safari Montage vs United Streaming

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Permalink Reply by John R Holt on March 26, 2009 at 7:38am

David,

I am familiar with both and we use Safari Montage. I would be happy to answer questions. Safari's customer support here in the mid west is top notch!



John

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Permalink Reply by Brandon Holt on March 26, 2009 at 1:40pm

I made the switch from United Streaming to Safari and have been most satisfied. Performance and customer service have been excellent. I consider safari one of best investments our district has made. contact me if you'd like more info.

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Permalink Reply by David Kapuler on March 26, 2009 at 1:55pm

Thanks John/Brandon, I'm just curious if Montage is a less expensive solution the US although from the way it sounds, you need to bring a server into the mix to "house" the video. I definitely see the benefit of this as it will speed up any downloading/streaming time which is prevalent on US.

I'd also be curious to see how the videos stack up to each other. I've always thought US had a nice selection of online videos and really enjoyed their "teacher" section which allowed teachers to create: writing prompts, quizzes, etc.

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Permalink Reply by Della Curtis on March 27, 2009 at 12:03am

Our school district is extremely pleased with the Safari Montage video-on-demand solution. The content is outstanding in curriculum coverage, currency, and accessible via searching by state standards, keyword, subject, producer, and fully segmented by chapters. It is seamlessly used with our Promethean technologies enabling a teacher to stop the video and annotate and draw on the video. A great plus is that we are also able to upload Promethean flipcharts, podcasts, and our locally produced video content as well a public domain video content. In addition, Safari Montage has MARC records that are integrated with our Follett Destiny Online Public Access Catalog which enables teachers and students to search for library books, Safari content, e-books, and evaluated websites. Teachers can easily create playlists that are accessible from the Safari dashboard, export playlists, and share across the district. We especially like the ability to hypertext link to Safari Montage video content from our digital curriculum guides.

Safari Montage customer support is tops! A question is never left unanswered and the response time is immediate. Safari Montage is a cutting edge technology due to its leadership that is ALWAYS open to new ideas, suggestions, and tailoring the system to meed our needs.

Please visit our Safari Montage portal that has a wealth of information including all of our professional development materials that you may use. The URL is http://www.bpcs.org/offices/lis/safari

The real stakeholders are the teachers. Check out the voices of our teachers as noted below:


• Safari Montage has been like a jolt of juice for our technology integration program. At a recent faculty meeting, Marcie Zisow provided an abbreviated version of the PowerUp training session for my staff. The next day teachers were putting it into use. I have gotten many new requests for PC2TV connections. We have many small TVs in classrooms, but that has not swayed our faculty as soon as they get hooked up, they are breezing by finding great instructional applications. No other technology roll out has been put into such rapid independent application directly in the classroom!

• I want you to know that I have used the Safari Montage and found it to be very easy to use. I have shown my classes small parts of 2 programs on bridges. It was great that I could show just what I wanted the kids to know and it was so easy to find what I wanted.

• I used it also in the Architecture class. I showed the kids Frank Lloyd Wrights house Falling Water. The kids were very interested. The images projected very well and showed on the TV great. Finally something that works, is easy to use, focuses right on the points you want the kids to see.

• I just wanted to share how excited I am for the new video system. I used it today and it worked beautifully. The kids were actually enthusiastic about erosion because Bill Nye helped explain it! What a great technology update…

• The ease of use and curricular connections along with the chapter indexing makes this such a great tool! I had one classroom teacher tell me she showed a three minute segment and got applause!

• I presented Safari Montage for our staff development Friday and my teachers are thrilled. I showed them the standards links, how to make a playlist, how to focus on just a few seconds of a chapter, etc. and they could not wait to get back to their rooms. Thanks for all your hard work in getting us this resource. For those of us whose video collections leave a lot to be desired, Safari is a blessing. My teachers can now show actual film footage of events, zero in on specifics and do it all from the comfort of their rooms. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

• We started by showing a couple of videos and walking through the steps to locate clips during a faculty meeting; we did not tell teachers to use the system, just let them know that it was there. I was impressed with the number of teachers that responded the next week telling me that they had already used it and how fantastic it was.

• I was having fun watching some of the videos during my planning time today. I can’t wait to be able to use them.

• My teachers are crazy about Safari! I am receiving almost daily email from our teachers detailing something they found that was perfect for a lesson. I haven't seen them this excited about new technology in a long time. They especially love the segmented aspect of Safari. Enables them more control and the ability to target the important information for their students.

• Everyone is so excited around here about this new learning tool, especially since it so easy to use and incredibly appropriate for what we teach, that they are coming up with all sorts of ideas for using it.

• The e-community will be a great forum to share ideas about Safari. You're so right about the excitement among teachers. I just did a training session this afternoon for 9th grade S.S. dept. By the time I got home, I had a message from the chair asking if we could schedule another session for the rest of the dept. on Monday. Safari really is a welcome tool.

• Video Safari is a very exciting product and there are some great possibilities for it being an integral part of quality teaching and learning! I can't wait for the training and am excited about sharing it, in detail, with my teachers once this is complete. At our next faculty meeting I will have the opportunity to introduce the concept and I am sure it will be well received.

• Success! I can’t wait to show this to the teachers. I have been forwarding all the info you sent us and they are really hyped! Kudos again to you and your staff for being one of the “best of the best of the best”!

• I want you both to know how much excitement this new resource is creating in my school—and the majority of the folks don’t even know about it yet! I’ve selectively told a few teachers who I know will wholeheartedly embrace it and do marvelous educational things with it, but the rest will hear about it at our faculty meeting next week. When I got onto the principal’s schedule for this, I thought I would just be introducing something wonderful that possibly we would have in the spring. Now I can tell them it’s here and ready for their use!! They are going to be one mighty impressed group of educators!

• We just got our server yesterday and several teachers have already compiled playlists and are brainstorming all sorts of ways to use SM in their lessons. And our communications teacher is excited because he knows his morning announcements video crew will love it for special segments like “This Day in History.”

• Thanks again for all you have done to make this incredible learning tool happen for us—and happen so quickly, too!

• Can't thank you enough for arranging for the Safari Montage System. Wow.....I introduced it yesterday to the faculty...what an awesome tool.

• The Art dept. has embraced Safari Montage! They love having art video’s now…something I never had in my plastic video collection!

• Wow! I introduced it to my folks today, and they are going crazy with it! I found the company telephone support wonderfully responsive to our content question today. Just thought I’d keep you in our loop.

• I did my first lessons using S-Montage during the week of 1/22-1/26. It worked very well and did engage students from 3d-7th grade. It helped me to differentiate the content among the wide range of abilities we see in our students. I was able to use print on the same topic with some classes. I could pause and interpret, do formative assessments, and shorten the material when needed. It's a great development!

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Permalink Reply by David Kapuler on March 27, 2009 at 8:10am

Wow, thanks for all this detail, I will go over this w/ our LMC director and director of Curriculum. They were just introduced to it at the WEMTA conference in Madison WI this past week.

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Permalink Reply by Julie Baird on March 28, 2009 at 7:08am

Della, I went to the link above but did not see anything related to Safari Montage. I ended up at the home page (?) of the Royal Mail Group. Can you please check your link? I would love to find resources for PD concerning Safari Montage. We have it at our school and hardly anyone uses it. I think the main reason is that we weren't trained how to use it. I'm hoping your S-Montage portal will be useful to us.

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Permalink Reply by Monica Brown on June 25, 2009 at 11:57am

I'm also interested in the pricing of Safari Montage compared to United Streaming.

Monica

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Permalink Reply by J Owen on September 10, 2010 at 1:34pm

Our district also uses Safari Montage and we are very happy. It is great to have ECB content also seamlessly available through Safari. Our teachers love the product. The videos are current and well produced. I agree that the customer support in the midwest is great.

Judy

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