2018 NETA Awards - Engaged Learning
From: KET
Project Budget: $149,310
KET’s Media Lab allows students and teachers access to new skills and technologies in an environment that nurtures creative exploration without risk. Skills developed at KET workshops help educators and students integrate technology into curriculum-based projects using a variety of tools and resources. Workshop participant evaluations have been overwhelmingly approving and appreciative. The goal of the Media Lab is to provide hands-on workshops that tap into important college and career-ready skills so that students can become successful and responsible content creators. Students learn at their own pace, creating with media arts-related technology and free or affordable resources. School groups are able to take what they learn and apply it to individual or group projects in school, work, and everyday life.
What Did the Judges Say?
Technology evolves constantly, and KET’s Media Lab has kept pace with it while maintaining ties to Kentucky's educational requirements.
"If you build it, they will come," especially if you underwrite the travel expenses, which KET did with a grant from the state's DOE. That was a meaningful and important boost for students and teachers statewide. Great strategy. For under $72,000 they have achieved remarkable success providing over 3,000 students and teachers with practical experience in production technologies. Execution fulfilled their strategies: 1.) updating and upgrading the Lab's offerings to keep pace with student and teacher needs; 2.) the remarkable number of students and teachers – more than 70 per week -- who pass through the Lab each year.
KET’s Media Lab gets results! Repeat visits. Fan letters from educators. Personal testimonies to the effectiveness of the workshops and training. I'm impressed by the cost effectiveness and scope of the workshops and KET's ability to respond to new disciplines such when Media Arts was added to the National Arts Standards required for students. Also they were able to accomodate home schoolers and college classes not covered by the school travel grants.
So often lab equipment languishes unused because there isn’t staff or programs to accommodate use, or fear that the equipment will be lost or broken. Once again KET has created and delivered something of great, continuing value for the students and educators of Kentucky. In doing so, it has also created a benchmark and a model for the rest of public media.