Back to School in Garland ISD

I always like “back to school” time because we get to meet our new teachers. It’s super exciting! We spend several days training teachers on all of the technology available in our district. One of the first things we show all of our teachers is how to use SAFARI Montage.

As soon as we start showing the program, teachers ask how soon they can access it! Even if you’ve been using SAFARI Montage all along, it never hurts to hear a few reminders about all the great things offered. It’s not just about videos. SAFARI Montage offers images and clips, audio and video, and black line masters and quizzes. A teacher’s guide is also available for many items.

I think what really jazzed up our teachers this year is the ability to search by standard. Immediately, teachers started “oohing and aahing”. We set our standards to Texas (TEKS) and then narrowed our search even more to reflect only the items that included the grade range(s) of the group of teachers we had in the room. Even narrowing the results down that way, teachers still had plenty of material to choose from.

Once teachers have selected the item they want to use, they can simply copy that state standard onto their lesson plans to support that portion of the lesson. It’s a triple bonus! Teachers document their use of technology, show how it ties to their required curriculum, and the kids get a solid educational item!

We asked our teachers to reflect at the end of the day and it was clear that we had hit a home run. We had several people leave comments on the evaluation about how excited they were about the great tool, SAFARI Montage.
 

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