Shutterstock, Inc., a provider of high-quality stock footage, recently supplied ReadingBear.org with 1,400 stock footage clips for an exciting new website that teaches children phonics and vocabulary for free. The website, a project of WatchKnowLearn.org, was created by Wikipedia co-founder Dr. Larry Sanger.
Utilizing their innovative method, ReadingBear.org pairs words with pictures and videos. In each presentation, the viewer is introduced to many words, one or more related phonics rules and many video illustrations of the words. Sanger credits Shutterstock’s extensive image and footage library and their smart search technology with bringing the words to life for the student. “I was able to quickly access a variety of imagery to illustrate all the words in Reading Bear’s vocabulary,” says Sanger. “Their wide selection is a major advantage. For projects such as this, we needed a tremendous amount of footage.” With Shutterstock’s low cost, gathering multiple selections is not a problem.
“At Shutterstock, we’re all about providing our clients with the ability to open up the visual elements of a project, whether it’s an independent film that for budgetary considerations can’t go on location, or a project such as Reading Bear that relies on visuals to support their lessons,” says Ben Pfeifer, Vice President of New Business at Shutterstock. “To fulfill that promise, we are always adding a variety of new and dynamic clips to our extensive library.”
It is the variety that sold Sanger on Shutterstock. “In illustrating ‘bat’ for example, we needed images to support the two meanings of the word,” Sanger explains. “I found many videos, including one of an animal flying around at night, where I could clearly see that it was a bat. It gave an accurate notion of what bats look like. In addition, I also found a perfect video of a boy swinging a baseball bat.”
When Sanger began searching for footage to illustrate a gorilla, his quest was to locate footage that would put the image in a non-threatening context. It didn’t surprise him that one of the clips he found not only showed the gorilla in his jungle habitat, but also gave the viewer a sense of body size and configuration that would not frighten a young viewer. “With this Shutterstock footage, the student will get a sense of the word ‘gorilla’, including what gorillas look like and where they live,” Sanger explains.
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