My district subscribes to United Streaming and my high school library will subscribe to Safari Montage next year. So we will have two online video libraries for our teachers to use. Do any of you use online video? Which providers do you use and what can you say about them?
United Streaming is more affordable than Safari Montage, but video quality is poor, although content is broad. Their foreign language library is good - our teachers use it. Clips or movies are downloaded, then played from the desktop.
Safari Montage is expensive but great quality, click & play - no download needed. Content is a bit more limited but what's there is great.
Both offer closed-captioning.
Thanks for sharing your experience on this.
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We only have United Streaming, so I cannot compare between Safari. But I can tell you that our teachers love United Streaming and use it often. Usually they will download the video beforehand and save it to a share folder for easy access. They also love the segment option so that they can just show one specific clip to the students. For example, our US History teacher uses SmartBoard Notebook to display her lecture notes, and then embeds United Streaming clips at certain points throughout the notes. So with just a touch of the board, the clip opens to emphasize or demonstrate her point.
I use Unitedstreaming, but I live in GA, and our state actually bought it for all public schools, so it is even more affordable for me. I use it, and I've just purchased a program so hopefully I can convert their WMV files to DVD files, so teachers can play them on regular DVD players, which we have a lot of.
We subscribe to both. Our teachers rely on Safari for the Schessinger series they've loved since the VHS days. I also collect a pathfinder for free video sources: http://mciu.org/~spjvweb/video.html
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buffalo.wmv