If you are a secondary school, you may already be a subscriber to Channel 4/Espresso’s Clipbank service. If you are, then you might not have noticed that there’s a brand new daily feature that has just launched called News Blast.

News Blast is a daily 60 second bulletin specifically for secondary school students. It is a joint project between  Espresso and ITN. The Clipbank site will now be updated every day at around 8.00am during term time. Each bulletin has an accompanying full text transcript and can be accessed at a later date through an archive.

News Blast should greatly enhance the presence of Clipbank across the whole secondary school. Containing the latest news for that morning, the fast paced bulletin will be ideal for showing in assemblies, form tutor time, PSHE or Citizenship lessons, pre- or post-school clubs or on screens located around the school.

For example this morning’s News Blast featured these stories:

  • UK STANDING: Cameron denies Britain is in decline on the world stage
  • BLACK HOLE: Nasa finds evidence of youngest black hole in Earth’s cosmic neighbourhood
  • FACEBOOK EMAIL: Mark Zuckerberg launches new messaging service to compete with Yahoo and Google
  • SPIDER MAN: Australian man begins record attempt by living with 400 spiders
Clipbank is a unique learning service for secondary schools that offers a weekly updated library of thousands of video clips across 16 subjects. In addition to short video clips, Clipbank provides multimedia activities, web links and tools, planning & curriculum support for teachers and home access for students and teachers. The weekly news bite will also continue as before.
To watch a News Blast for yourself, visit the Clipbank Facebook page.
Clipbank is a subscription service, so it’s not available online. But it is an excellent resource for the entire KS3/KS4 curriculum. For more information about Clipbank, click here.