A Substantial Return on Investment
with the SAFARI Montage® Solution
Major savings for your school district when transitioning from physical to digital media
Streamlines school district communications
Traditionally, superintendent messages have been presented over closed-circuit broadcasts and in many other forms. TheSAFARI Montage solution offers three different methods of delivering a video message in a far more cost-effective manner. Each of these methods also provides reporting data for every user who has logged on to watch.
- SAFARI Montage CreationStation® enables the user to upload and distribute recorded addresses so that an entire district can watch a single message simultaneously or when it is convenient for each user.
- SAFARI Montage® Live! provides a means of live video
conferencing to a significant number of participants via a
private WAN. - SAFARI Montage® Selective Video Streaming allows a digital camera feed to be accessible with a simple click on the SAFARI Montage dashboard. Every student and teacher can watch the live feed over the private WAN.
Teachers save time in many ways
The time that teachers must spend preparing traditional media for a lesson is time that they could be using to prepare quality lessons or spend with students. SAFARI Montage products save teachers time during both prep and instruction, thereby leaving more opportunity for better lesson preparation and increased instructional minutes, which lead to greater student achievement.
SAFARI Montage products also facilitate lesson preparation by providing specific, relevant segments of video that are easy to find with standards or keyword searching, thereby saving time formerly used to queue and rewind to find appropriate portions of hard copy programs. Time formerly spent at the library before and after class to borrow hard copy video for previewing and preparing lesson plans can now be done from home. The VCR/DVD player and TV cart become relics of the past when digital media is controlled at the teacher’s desktop and output to a large screen.
All content is always available to every teacher for both preparation and instruction, even if it is being viewed by another at the same time. In addition, district-level personnel can create multimedia lesson plans to distribute instantly throughout the schools—yet another way to save teachers both preparation and in-class time while ensuring high-quality and consistent visual instruction. Plus, the compatibility with Promethean flipcharts enables teachers to upload and share Activboard work with other teachers throughout their school or district.
“SAFARI Montage not only saves money, but time as well. The time that a teacher would use to research information has been saved simply by going right into SAFARI Montage, and the information is already aligned with our State voluntary curriculum. You’ve addressed an alignment issue, and you’ve addressed access to information without searching for it. It is just fantastic.”
“The best investment that you can make with regards to curriculum instruction links back to student performance. And we can begin to show data based on the classroom use of SAFARI Montage and the content, and the body of information being used in it as it relates to our curriculum, and our assessment component, where we’re beginning to see strong gains in performance—simply because students
are engaged.”
– Dr. Joe Hairston, Superintendent, Baltimore County Public Schools
Purchasing individual VHS tapes and DVDs vs. digital delivery – the value proposition
Individual “hard copy” titles represent a significant investment annually for any school or school district. A typical video costs $29.95, and some can run as high as $60 - $99. These hard copy videos (whether VHS or DVD) are only available to one user at a time, occupy significant physical space in the school library and need to be managed every time they are checked in or out. Most schools spend between $600 - $1,500/year on new hard copy programs. Therefore, an average elementary school librarian only purchases approximately 20 new titles per year.
By comparison, a SAFARI Montage elementary school content package contains over 1,000 hand-picked titles and costs only $1/title/school/year. The K-8 Core Content Package has a value of approximately $40,000 if purchased, but these 1,000 premium titles can be licensed digitally for only $1,000/year.
Conserves Internet bandwidth
Digital media products that stream via the Internet often use a considerable amount of bandwidth, which can be very costly. Because the SAFARI Montage solution runs on a LAN or private WAN rather than streaming over the Internet, schools can control and preserve the use of their public Internet bandwidth.
Manages classroom devices
Classroom Projector Control The latest innovation from SAFARI Montage called Pathways SM performs many functions to control
and manage classroom devices, including projectors. The All-Off feature ensures that all projectors are turned off at the end of the school day, thereby conserving energy. School districts have reported preserving bulb life by up to 40%.
T
he SAFARI Montage suite of products provides major savings for school districts that are converting from traditional media formats to innovative, digitally delivered methods. The dramatic return on investment makes an enterprise-level digital media management system an essential purchase for all school districts. The following document examines several key aspects of how SAFARI Montage will save any school district significant dollars.
Conversion to Digital TV
As local TV stations and/or cable providers discontinue their analog broadcast in 2009, it is likely that many school districts will face several issues in the conversion to digital. Traditional coax/RF networks are typically insufficient for schools to run digital broadcasting content and will most likely require a costly upgrade to maintain.
It is time to examine the benefits of shifting away from TVs and coax/RF networking in favor of using the data network for TV transmission and projectors for display. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) used SAFARI Montage Selective Video Streaming (SVS) to deliver the live presidential inauguration to 408,000 students in the district. Using SAFARI Montage SVS, schools were able to view CNN’s live cable TV broadcast of Barack Obama’s historic inauguration, while also participating in the first-ever district-wide assembly. SAFARI Montage SVS allowed for the successful re-distribution of cable feeds over the CPS data network. SAFARI Digital Transcoders effectively transcoded the feed (with permission from CNN) and multicast the live CNN broadcast of the inauguration across the district’s data network.
Chicago Public Schools saved with SAFARI Montage
Chicago Public Schools saved over $500,000 on a single new school construction site. In the construction of Westinghouse High School, CPS did this by eliminating the need for in-house media distribution, cable distribution through a coax/RF network and other infrastructure. This change in district standards cut down on the need for hundreds of servers and, with the necessary bandwidth in place, allowed for the support of all schools from a central location.
Chicago Public Schools
Over $500,000 Savings In One New School:
- Video Retrieval System: $367,000
- Cable Head-End: $50,000 - $60,000
- Coax Drags (MMTV): $42,000 - $52,000
- Conduit $30,000 - $35,000
- Videoconferencing Suite: $22,515
- Classroom Monitors & IR Controls: N/A
Source: Chicago Public Schools
Easily and immediately distributes district-produced video to schools and teachers
The traditional method of distribution is to physically duplicate a VHS tape or DVD and deliver it to schools via van or USPS. In some instances, multiple copies of a video are made for each school. The cost of duplicating and delivering a video
is expensive and slow. With the high price of gasoline, it is essential to eliminate this form of distribution. Some school districts estimate
that it costs them $10/video to duplicate, deliver, retrieve and manage a program.
By comparison, after the initial purchase, the SAFARI Montage solution costs the district nothing each time a video is distributed. Digital delivery offers many additional benefits, including greater accessibility from any PC in the school or at home, user login and activity logs, and segmented, meta-tagged video that allows users to find precisely the video clip they need.
Provides customized Professional Development in a cost-efficient manner
There are a number of expenses that are incurred when teachers travel to a location for face-to-face training, including stipends
for substitutes and teacher overtime, mileage paid to teachers (and travel time), refreshments and meals, location costs, trainers and more. The average cost to attend Professional Development can be estimated at $150 - $500 per day, per individual. Some districts spend as much as $1,000 per year, per teacher on all Professional Development-related expenses.
But when Professional Development video is both created and distributed digitally by the school district, the duplication, distribution and travel expenses otherwise incurred are eliminated. Best Practices videos of “master” teachers can easily be delivered to every teacher. Teachers may watch the video in school or from home at a time that’s convenient for them, and through activity logs, administrators can verify when the video has been viewed. Accompanying literature can also be attached to each video file. When Professional Development video is available on-demand, teachers may review segments of video when it is most convenient.
In addition, SAFARI Montage® Live! (SML), a new and innovative product from SAFARI Montage, supports remote Professional Development through live interactive video conferencing to the desktop. SML also provides the ability to conduct online polling/surveys.