Berlin (GER), December 2014 - The power of footage to convey events and ideas with immediacy and impact has been clear since the advent of celluloid. Film can convey the emotional, the extraordinary, and the complex so succinctly that it makes them an ideal resource for teachers seeking to inspire their students. Over the last fifteen years ITN Source has established a solid partnership with Discovery Education (formerly Espresso Education) to deliver video content that can then be applied for an educational purpose and delivered straight to the classroom.
A large part of this is taking events from the real world and then applying them to a curriculum objective – turning the sometimes "dry" into something remarkable and compelling through a specifically designed learning product. This could be footage of glaciers for geography, the Large Hadron Collider for science, or the Queen’s coronation for history.
Acknowledging the astonishing breadth of school curriculums, Lewis Bronze, Director of Content at Discovery Education, said, "The strength of ITN Source has been its diversity, with so many collections."
And it’s not just news, events, and current affairs. Discovery Education used footage from David Lean’s famous adaptation of Great Expectations, part our ITV Studios catalogue, to teach secondary-school pupils about the work of Charles Dickens. The footage was used with the voice of an academic and a product created specifically to engage young people on the subject.
ITN Source is the gateway to a treasure trove of inspirational and iconic creative moving imagery spanning 118 years (from 1896 to present day). We provide access to award-winning news and entertainment programming, documentaries, and feature films covering everything from news to drama, celebrity, comedy, music, wildlife, and natural history.
As the footage licensing division of ITN in the UK, and one of the world’s largest commercial archives, we have worked seamlessly with Discovery Education to develop services that are used in over fifty percent of UK primary schools. Discovery Education is a division of Discovery Communications, the number-one non-fiction media company in the world, which includes the popular global television networks Discovery Channel, Science Channel, and Animal Planet.
Lewis Bronze has paid tribute to our partnership and said, "It's hard to think of Discovery Education Espresso being the renowned service it has become without this relationship."
ITN Source represents the footage libraries of ITN, Reuters (including historic newsreel collections), ITV Studios, Fox News and Fox Movietone, UTV, Asian News International, and many other specialist collections. We have over 500,000 hours of video content online, and we are continuously uncovering new, rare, and never-seen-before content through ongoing digitization of the archive.
This isn’t just about using dusty reels of film to bring "history" into the present, however. Our footage is equally powerful to illustrate the concepts and constructs that underpin vital STEM subjects for example – taking the apparently theoretical and showing it in action in the real world. Combining the right film and educational expertise we can make the learning experience deeply rewarding for pupil and teacher alike.
