Recognizing the need to engage a new generation of students who are visual learners, Maryland's Baltimore County Public Schools--the nation's 25th-largest school system--has installed video servers and a video-on-demand system in all of its 169 schools.

The system, SAFARI Montage by the Library Video Company, will allow teachers to access and play more than a thousand video programs from leading publishers such as National Geographic and Scholastic. It also will enable Baltimore County to expand not only its curricular offerings, but also its professional development, according to school district officials.

"The vision is to make the curriculum more 21st-century and engaging," said Della Curtis, coordinator for Baltimore County's Office of Library Information Services (LIS).

The use of video on demand is nothing new for schools. A growing number of districts--including such large school systems as the Chicago Public Schools and Nevada's Clark County School District--have begun integrating digital video clips into lessons. But what distinguishes Baltimore County's effort is that the district has convened teams of teachers in each school to brainstorm ways of using the new resources to their fullest potential across each academic discipline.

"Our school system is proud to have won local, national, and even international awards for its use of technology in furthering student achievement," said Joe A. Hairston, Baltimore County superintendent and a 2005 recipient of eSchool News' Tech-Savvy Superintendent Award. "It is important for us to provide our staff and students with technology that supports the essential teaching and learning process taking place in our classrooms every day. We are always interested in technology that is user-friendly and proven effective and that provides staff with the flexibility to meet students' needs."

School district officials aim to implement the system district-wide to "support the entire curriculum, and make it multimedia," said Andrew Schlessinger, CEO of Library Video Company. Baltimore County educators "are spending a lot of time developing lesson plans for the 2007-08 school year, but they're also using them already," Schlessinger said.

He added that Baltimore County's video project "represents our vision for how we'd like to see the product used. … This is really the first district I can honestly say is 100 percent behind everything that SAFARI Montage can do."

The video content isn't hosted on Library Video's servers, Schlessinger said, but instead resides on the district's network in a peer-to-peer type of relationship, much like a YouTube-style environment, but which is controlled and targeted specifically for the school field.

Curtis said Baltimore County evaluated streaming video products for the past two years and chose SAFARI Montage as its solution because the system will allow the district to bring multimedia and moving images to classrooms without compromising bandwidth.