It’s every K-12 teacher’s dream: the ability to show an educational video clip or entire program, on demand, to illustrate a point and further engage students in the subject at hand. The SnapStream Server, acting as your school’s centralized multimedia center, gives educators just that. It streams live or recorded television directly to classrooms over the existing local-area network. And, unlike Safari Montage or Discovery Streaming, SnapStream allows teachers to record an unlimited amount of educational content (from PBS, History Channel, A&E, CNN, Discovery, etc.) for free; there are never any subscription fees.
The SnapStream Server puts TV resources at every teacher’s fingertips. By being able to schedule, search, and clip recordings easily from the PCs on their desks, teachers no longer have to wait their turn for shared A/V setups—or rely on other people to make recordings for them. With SnapStream’s solution, teachers can enhance their lesson plans with relevant video content. By using TV in the classroom, teachers can reinforce and expand on curricula, increase students’ interest, and respond to a variety of learning styles.
With simple configuration and minimal upkeep, the SnapStream Server can also save teachers hours of manual labor involved in recording, watching, and transcribing old VHS tapes. One SnapStream Server can record up to 10 TV shows simultaneously and store up to 17,000 hours of TV. Teachers may then quickly and easily locate footage in the archives by identifying keyword(s) in the closed-captioning. Once they’ve located the desired video, they can clip the content and download it to their computer, burn it to DVD, or stream it directly to the classroom.
- Distribute TV to classrooms using the school’s existing infrastructure
The SnapStream Server supports in-class instruction, delivering recorded TV on demand and streaming live TV over the LAN to multiple classrooms. Our system eliminates the need for RF cable drops, DVRs, VCRs, and TVs in every classroom. The easy-to-use, familiar interface (think: home DVR) helps teachers schedule, search, and clip recorded video with little or no training.
- Build a vast digital archive
The SnapStream Server lets faculty collaborate and build a unified electronic library. Our client-server architecture allows them to avoid duplicating efforts and to replace unwieldy VHS and DVD collections with a streamlined, centralized repository of recordings and clips accessible to everyone, including students, via any desktop computer on the school’s network.
- Supplement lesson plans with relevant TV content
Plan to talk about China in your new world history class? You’re not the first teacher to do so—and with the SnapStream Server, there’s no need to start entirely from scratch. Search for the terms “China” and “history” pull up all mentions of “China” in your colleagues’ prior recordings. From there, you can stream an entire show, or you can clip out portions you’d like to use and burn them to DVD or download them to your PC.
- Search TV with the speed and ease of searching the Web
SnapStream’s powerful search-engine technology allows you to search thousands of hours of television recordings within seconds. Using our closed-captioning search, teachers can find what has been broadcast on a given topic without having to watch hours of television. Educators can also view and download transcripts of the shows to review content and language. Additionally, our technology revolutionizes the way journalism and political-science research gets done, allowing K-12 teachers and students to do the type of quality research that, in the past, only academics at large universities with unconstrained resources could do.
- Get email alerts
Receive automatic e-mail alerts from the SnapStream Server when mentions of your keyword(s) occur in new TV recordings.
- Control user access
Network administrators can control who accesses the server and what features they have access to. The server integrates with Active Directory, allowing users to keep their existing credentials for authentication and letting administrators manage permissions based on user groups.