Replacing Discovery Education Streaming…

For the last five years, the State/AEA’s have provided schools with free access to Discovery Education Streaming (DE Streaming).   This resource has been used by WDM staff members, as it provides access to thousands of short as well as full length videos that are categorized by content and grade level.    Late last spring, we were notified by the state that DE Streaming’s price had increased significantly and the service would be ending.

Considering that the service was dropped at the end of school year, this left us with very little time to evaluate other options.  We decided to purchase one additional year of DE Streaming (this school year) and then we would use this year to evaluate other options.
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The option that has our attention right now is… Safari Montage.

Q1.  Why not just stay with DE Streaming?
A1.   First, concerns about additional future prices increases.  Second, we have a growing list of additional needs related to the storage and playback of other video content.  

Q2.  Are you saying that we ARE buying Safari Montage?
A2. No.  We have made NO purchases, we are only announcing that they are the leading candidate at this time and we are in conversations with them about running a pre-purchase pilot to determine if it will meet our needs.

 Q3.  How is Safari Montage comparable to DE Streaming?

1. It provides thousands of short and full length video clips sorted by content area and grade.  Unfortunately, the videos are NOT exactly the same – but the volume of content is comparable.

2. They both allow users to create bookmarks/playlists to keep track of which videos correlate to your specific classroom needs.

Q4. What are the additional features that would be available if we went with Safari Montage?
1.Ability to integrate with our existing network accounts.  This means you could use your existing network user name/password.  In fact, it also means that students would also use their existing accounts – which makes it easier for staff and students to use and loginto the product.  

2. Ability for each user to STORE THEIR OWN videos on the system.  For example, if a student produced a video as part of project, it could be loaded to the system to be shared with other users.  It’s likely that the staff would also share videos for professional development purposes.

3. Ability to share videos with the public.  If desired, our own content could be marked for public access – meaning that the videos would be available to parents and community members.

4. Ability to redirect online streaming content.  Example:  Last year, the Decorah Eagle web cam was very popular. In fact, so popular that we couldn’t get anything else done because all of our bandwidth was used up watching the eagles.  They would help us re-direct the eagle stream to a local, internal online channel – so users could still watch the eagle through safari montage and then we could block the actual website so that internet bandwidth would be preserved for other uses.

5. Ability to stream live TV channels to help those classrooms who need the ability to display TV through their classroom projectors.

Again, at this time – we have purchased NOTHING.  We are simply evaluating options.  Our questions for you….

Do you see value in testing/piloting this type of system?  

How might you benefit from these capabilities?

Please leave your thoughts in the comments fields below…

Planned Internet Outage, late afternoon Oct 19th

There will be short, sporadic internet outages, late in the afternoon, after school is out of session, on Wed. Oct 19th.

1. Why?
We are in the process of switching between our current primary provider (State of Iowa) and our current secondary provider (netINS).

2. Are we dropping one provider and switching to another?
We aren’t dropping either service provider, we are simply switching them around… netINS will become our primary provider instead of ICN/State of Iowa.

3. Why does this need to be done?
In terms of outages/reliability, it makes more sense to have your primary provider be the one that has the most reliability and least amount of outages.  For us, that would netINS, so it’s in our best interest to make this switch.

4. How long will the outage be?
Instead of one long outage, there will actually be several shorter outages as we reconfigure our equipment to move netINS into the primary position.

5. What services will be impacted?
Just internet services… anything that involves browsing the web.

6. If I’m at school- will I not be able to use the computers at all?
If you are at school, you will be able to continue to use the computers – you’ll be able to log in, get to your network drives, print, etc…  However, any services that require internet will be impacted (visiting google, IFAS, etc)

7. When it’s finished – will we have more bandwidth? will it be faster?
Switching the two providers around will not add any bandwidth or increase any speeds – its sole purpose is to move the provider with the best reliability into the primary position.