Media on Demand

Not so long ago we were reminiscing about teaching in the “old days”. Remember the jelly pad and the spirit duplicator, classes far in excess of thirty students. Some of us even joked about lugging a huge analogue camera around on excursions hoping we wouldn’t get a hernia.
Remember the days of the film, slide and film strip projectors. All of these things have gone the way of the Dodo and it seems that the video could soon be joining this illustrious group.
Media on Demand from Classroom Video looks at replacing video tapes with a digital video library. Classroom Video have digitised all of their videos and placed them on a hard drive. The old VHS tapes took up considerable space in the library, were difficult to catalogue, hard to keep up-to-date and degraded over time where as the digital videos suffer from none of these problems.
With Media on Demand any computer on a network can have access to any video from the hard drive with up to forty users accessing the same video.
Just imaging the time saving with not having to book videos, trying to find a video player or ensuring there is a room suitable for viewing. Now anyone with access to a computer can view a video in their own time, replay a video or sections of a video using the MonD Player.

Because the video is in digital format the videos in Media on Demand are divided into chapters. This makes it easier to view the appropriate section, cue to a point before a lesson or navigate through the video. Sections of the videos can also be exported and used in either teacher or student PowerPoint presentations.
Each video comes with teacher notes in pdf format with guidance on how to best utilise the titles in the classroom.
It is easy to search the data base to find a suitable video. You can search by subject, key word or even year or grade. Once a suitable video is found it is just a simple matter of double clicking on the title to get it to play.

Media on Demand also contains captions on some videos for the hearing impaired and it is a simple matter for teachers to add quizzes to any video.
Teacher-librarians will certainly be impressed by the MonD Manager which gives them total control over Media on Demand. MonD Manager allows users to add their own videos, chapter headings, specify subjects for each video, print a list of selected videos, add quizzes and make custom databases for different users. MonD Manager also allows users to copy, move or delete videos.

The stock take feature is sure to bring a smile to the face of any teacher-librarian with its ability to show which files in the database are XML, MPEG and pdf files. Add the fact that Media on Demand is available in both Mac and Windows format with a Linux version appearing soon and it appears that Classroom Video have a winner on their hands.

Hardware and software supplied by Classroom Video. Software reviewed by Rosemary McDowall and Bill Gillespie. Rosemary teaches at Mosman HS while Bill teaches at Seaforth PS. Bill and Rosemary can be contacted at computer_corner2000@yahoo.com