NETS-T Standards

As a high school video and film teacher the NETS for Teachers are especially applicable to my classroom. One thing I think is interesting about the National Educational Technology Standards for Teachers is that there are so few standards. Most of the standards are broad in scope, but it seems like collecting feedback from so many different teachers would result in a long list of standards instead of just five.

The NETS standards I am not as comfortable with and I need work on are numbers one and four.

Standard one states that teachers should "facilitate and inspire student learning and creativity." I think I do a good job teaching the content in my classroom, but I need to do a better job of inspiring creativity in students. I have always been a creative person, but I do not think I have modeled this enough in my classroom. I am always disappointed by the lack of creativity by most of my students, but I have not done enough to model creativity and push them to be more creative. I am not sure how much one can teach how to be creative, but I can do a better job of pushing my students to think outside the box when creating their projects.

One example is when my classes make their instructional videos. Usually I have three or four groups that just want to teach how to cook something. Those videos almost always end up boring the classes to death when we watch. It meets the technical requirements of the project, so it usually gets the group a decent grade after I hack off some points for lack of creativity and originality. Instead of letting groups slide through into production with a lame script I am going to start requiring groups to revamp their script until it meets a certain level of creativity. I will help the groups come up with more creative variations or options for their stories, but I do not want for all the stories to be my work instead of the students. To inspire creativity I will instead ask questions of the students to get them to come up with better ideas and scenarios.

Standard four encourages teachers to "model digital citizenship and responsibility." This is very difficult for me as a video teacher in one area in particular: music. Music is so important to video and can change the mood entirely of a short film. Opinions vary depending on who you ask, but many lawyers say that any unauthorized use of copyrighted music in a video production is copyright infringement. This is difficult for even big budget films to comply with because there are contracts that need to be signed by record labels or artists, negotiations for royalties, and sometimes screenings to make sure the song is being presented in an appropriate manner. I am not a lawyer and neither are my students, so we do not have the time and resources to ask for permission for a short student film that probably will not be seen by more than 150 people anyway. We also do not have the resources to hire composers to write original music.

What we can do is use royalty-free music that is available on the internet or through purchasing libraries, or we can use original music produced by our music classes at school. I have not done a good enough job of collecting copyright-free music or directing students to sites that operate under Creative Commons licensing because it is so easy for students to bring in an mp3 and put it on their soundtrack. I also have not made enough effort to create a collaboration with the music department so that they can add music to projects, but it never seems like I have the time to support such efforts. A collaborative effort with our music tech students would be much more indicative of what happens in the real world, and students would probably make better video projects to avoid disappointing these students and embarrassing themselves with a poor video.