NAEB Newsletter (February 1, 1964)

a full-dress rehearsal before each taping. This is UW’s first full-scale TV course in undergraduate science. ^ Several prominent Canadian school authorities who visited Chicago’s TV College within the past year have become en¬ thusiastic about the Chicago Board of Education’s success with ETV. Canada is facing a college expansion crisis very similar to ours. On the authorities’ recommendation, a CBC television crew has filmed a day in the operation of WTTW, the TV College station, to be part of a CBC documentary on the higher education crisis, showing one American response. ^ Stanford University’s intern teachers from the school of education are using videotape recordings of their high school classroom presentations to view and improve their perform¬ ances, thanks to a Ford Foundation-supported project directed by Robert N. Bush. Two former teachers working toward their doctorates in education, Keith Acheson and Alan Rob¬ ertson, form the camera crew, which visits high schools where Stanford interns are in action. The 20-minute recorded seg¬ ment of the class period is shown to the intern in private, after which he discusses his performance with his supervisors. An¬ other use of videotape was to tape Richard Gross teaching a group of his intern teachers, to serve as the basis for a second lecture by Gross on his own methods of teaching captured on the first film. ^ A teachers’ meeting via closed-circuit television gave music teachers who receive the fine arts program on Austin’s KLRN-TV an opportunity to visit informally with TV teacher Janet McGaughey, professor of music at the University of Texas. Professor McGaughey was telecast from the KLRN- TV studios in Austin, where a group of Austin teachers had gathered. Another group of teachers watched in San Marcos at Southwest Texas State College, a third group saw the show at San Antonio College. After Mrs. McGaughey’s pres¬ entation, everyone was able to ask questions directly through a specially designed talk-back system from the two receiving rooms. ^ To help update mathematical thinking and teaching, Richard Vinson, Huntington College professor of mathematics, is do¬ ing two series of telecasts over the Alabama ETV network, one for teachers and another for classroom instruction. The need for updating: present junior high subject matter was taught 15 years ago only in grad school. ^ WHYY-TV, E. R. Squibb and Sons, and the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science have joined to bring the 7,000 pharmacists in the area a ten-week half-hour series of seminars designed to inform them of the latest developments in pharmaceutical science and therapeutic progress. All of the seminar lectures will be videotaped and made available to other ETV stations. ^ Through her ETV program, Alabama teacher Alma Bates acts on her theory that student dropouts are usually ones who have had early spelling and reading problems, with other learning impeded more and more through each passing year because of this 'lack of skill. Her idea (that students, once they become thoroughly confused by the tricky relationships between spelling and pronunciation, tend to fall further and further behind the class in spelling and reading, then in other subjects as reading becomes the basis for study) led her to design a diagnostic spelling test which she annually gives dur¬ ing her now eight-year-old telecourse, “Improve Your Read¬ ing.” Classroom teachers grade the papers, make note of who needs additional work, and forward the results to her. Al¬ though her telecourse, which emphasizes lower-grade speech study and letter-picture association charts, is geared basically to grades two through six, several high schools schedule it for their students having English problems. ^ Radio programs broadcast over WABE-FM are being used to supplement the televised Spanish course for fourth grade students in Atlanta and Fulton County public schools. Short radio lessons review the vocabulary heard on WETV during NAEB Headquarters: Suite 1119, 1346 Connecticut Avenue, N. W., Washington, D. C., 20036. Phone 667-6000. Area Code 202. “Nuestros Amigos,” the television Spanish course. WABE broadcasts the radio programs in the afternoon and evening preceding the broadcast for classroom listening. ^ Lee Dreyfus, general manager, WHA-TV, University of Wisconsin: “I’m negotiating with the commercial people who hold the most popular programs to get some of them for for¬ eign language teaching. Almost all our top commercial pro¬ grams are being put out in a lot of different languages—like Gunsmoke and Huckleberry Hound. And Father Knows Best, but that wouldn’t work so well, it’s a ‘concept’ program. For learning language fast you need a lot of action. I got this idea in Detroit, found the foreign-born were learning plenty of English from watching action programs—sporting events, cowboys. (I knew some Hungarians who always used the word ‘pardner’ for ‘friend’). We’re just going to reverse the process and use it for high school students. College too.” PROGRAMS ^ The University of Wichita, in cooperation with the YMCA and the Community Committee on Social Action, began a seventeen-week non-credit course January 18 in contemporary race relations entitled “Race: Myth and Reality.” The series, produced by Richard J. Meyer, director of-ETV at the Uni¬ versity of Wichita, will be seen over a special four-station, four-city hookup. ^ The European Broadcasters Union has chosen a new NET “What’s New” production as an outstanding example of U. S. children’s television programing. Directed by University of Texas’ Earl Miller, produced by KLRN-TV, Austin, and narrated by Chill Wills, the three half-hour films explore the Rio Grande through a thousand-mile filming expedition which left from Presidio, Texas, in small, flat-bottomed boats, and arrived at the Gulf of Mexico six weeks later. The crew filmed such sights as pre-historic pictographs painted by unknown Indians, ghost towns on both the Mexican and American sides of the river, and paintings and other records of the Alamo, as welll as their own record of how the ex¬ pedition was made. ^ University of North Carolina faculty members are dis¬ cussing Personal Finances over WUNC-TV. Directed at the North Carolina citizen of average means, the 16-program se¬ ries studies wills, estates, trusts, taxes, credit buying, invest¬ ment, savings, and the matter of getting one’s money worth. ^ Music programing at WBUR is making a major shift to¬ ward thorough coverage of local performances by adding the live broadcasts of Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts and the Symphony Hall organ recital series, as well as the taping of 20 on-campus concerts and recitals for later broadcast. ^ What is reported to be the first statewide diabetes public information TV program series in the U. S. is currently be¬ ing telecast over Alabama’s Channels 2, 7, 10, and 26. Orig¬ inating in the network’s Birmingham studio, it is produced in association with the Alabama Diabetics Association and the University of Alabama Medical College. ^ “Spotlight on Schools,” a weekly radio series heard over WABE-FM, Atlanta, allows administrators from Atlanta and Fulton County schools, on alternate weeks, to discuss the op¬ eration of the schools, curriculum studies, budget matters, ex¬ perimentation, and general school needs. Plans are being made to release the tapes from this series to a commercial station for rebroadcast. GENERAL ^ Ampex Corporation is now offering its low-cost, portable instrumentation recorder in a 7-channel version as well as the original 4-channel model to allow recording of a wider range of data. The SP-300 is one-sixth the size and half the cost of previous magnetic tape instrumentation recording systems of comparable performance and is designed for use in re¬ search and applied areas of medicine, education, and industry. ^ Two students at the University of Michigan have formed a Rachmaninoff club to advance the music of the great classical composer. The club is issuing recordings of Rachmaninoff FEBRUARY 1964 3