Fulton County School System is a large district with 106 schools and over 95,000 students in the Atlanta Metropolitan area. According to Dr. Emily Bell, Chief Information Officer at Fulton County Schools, “We have all the challenges of a metropolitan city that are difficult in normal times. But as we have gone into this season of remote learning, it exacerbates all of those challenges that existed already. When we went to remote learning in March, our district did a survey of our parents and we asked them, what are you liking about remote learning so far? What are you not liking?

“And one of the things that they said was they didn’t like the district using so many different platforms. At the time we allowed our schools some autonomy. Some were using Google Classroom. Some were using Edmodo. We had a couple of schools that had contracts with Schoology. We had all kinds of different things going on. The clear message from our parents was we want something standard, safe, supported and effective. So, the superintendent made the call, and our IT division did the work to ensure that Microsoft and Microsoft Teams was a viable platform to do the communication and collaboration needed during remote learning. We leaned into Microsoft Teams, and then in the instructional application side, Teams had an integration with Safari Montage, which we already had. We had a number of digital resources within the platform.”

Rob Stratton, Vice President of Learning Innovation & Strategy at Safari Montage explains, “at the core of the product is the learning object repository, which is is simply a LOR that helps the districts centralize all their content resources to simplify the workflow for teachers, so all content comes to one central location and then can be shared into their LMS like Teams. For student use, we not only centralize it, but we catalog it and then we enhance it by giving the ability to align resources to standards, and then provide instructional tools around the use of those learning objects. The platform is hosted in our newest version on the Microsoft Azure cloud.”

Learn how Teams evolved in the district, how the district leveraged playlists for ease of use, and how streamlining their technology allowed Fulton County to create the perfect blend of tech to serve their students, teachers and parents for enhanced learning and teaching.