This year, the Learning Leadership Society chose SAFARI Montage as a Tech Imperative Award winner. The Tech Imperative Award is in recognition of leadership, building a foundation for K-12 digital learning environments. SAFARI Montage provides K-12 districts with an interoperable Learning Object Repository designed for in-person and remote engaged instruction, plus a video streaming library and IPTV and live video streaming.

The platform offers teachers and students equitable access to procured, created and curated educational digital resources and a place to search and manage learning objects and create playlists to feed other enterprise systems.

With LeiLani Cauthen, CEO of the Learning Counsel and host of the video are Kate Crawford, VP Strategic Accounts for SAFARI Montage and Tricia Kennedy, Evangelist for SAFARI Montage. According to Kennedy, “We're just so honored for the award and we're accepting it on behalf of SAFARI. Both of us have been customers of SAFARI for many years but are new to working with the company itself.”

“In my former life, I was a district administrator, director of digital learning and media services,” said Crawford. “One of my main passions was to ensure that life was a little bit easier for our teachers out there. And providing one enterprise level resource, such as the Learning Object Repository, as LeiLani just mentioned, in order for teachers to quickly search for content that is standards-aligned and is high quality was critically important. Not only during the pandemic, but also now that we've seen this entire 180 degree turn into more instructional options, be it asynchronous learning or synchronous learning.”

“As I just mentioned,” continued Crawford, “my passion has been finding ways to minimize the stress of teachers. So, between the pandemic learning laws for students, the never having enough time to plan and ensuring equity of resources for all students, the demands of the job are understandably overwhelming. Teachers are searching for engaging content that is flexible enough to meet the needs of individual students. It's a huge time investment that can be overwhelming. 40 percent of teachers are spending a minimum of approximately 20 hours a week searching for high quality instructional content.

“Learning Management Systems are not designed to help teachers compile, organize, and remix learning objects used to build instructional courses,” said Crawford. “This was definitely a struggle for a district leader, who was trying to push out an LMS during the pandemic. One of the things that I was most frustrated about is that we were rolling it out. We were teaching teachers how to utilize that LMS, but there was no content within the courses. They were empty shells. And so oftentimes, teachers are going to start from scratch from an LMS. They have no actual learning content within those courses. The SAFARI Montage Learning Object Repository, or LOR, is an enterprise level solution, and it delivers a new class of user experience, which ensures that educators and students have access to a continuous stream of curated high-quality content via federated search, which is truly tailored to their needs and preferences. A flexible LOR saves teachers 50 to 90 percent of the time typically spent on arduous searches across multiple platforms or within basic search engines.”

There is a very good reason that SAFARI Montage won this year’s Tech Imperative Award. You’ll want to tune in to this video, and learn how your teachers can spend more time teaching and less time searching through endless content.