“Television, kinescopes, and in-service education.” How can you resist a chapter title like that?

As a latent historian, digging around among old library books is a favorite pastime of mine. (Remember: books, too, are a “technology!”)

A Guide to Instructional Television (1964), edited by Dr. Robert M. Diamond, McGraw-Hill, caught my eye not too long ago. Here’s what I learned:

Kinescopes work well for in-service teacher training, says William Hansen of the Union School District, Cambrian Park, California, because presentations on live TV made at great expense could be captured and distributed widely to be reshown at any time and the price was minimal. A Kinescope, by the way, was a movie camera set up to record a live television program (pre-videotape).

Dr. George E. Bair of the South Carolina Educational TV Center reports that rural students taught algebra and geometry via TV were tested using a nationally standardized test. Mean results for the rural-television-taught students were consistently equal to or greater than mean results for the non-television students in metropolitan systems.

Dr. Diamond, in his summary chapter on the potential for instructional television reports, “Often in the comparisons of televised instruction with standard teaching techniques the teacher has simply been moved into the television studio with a minimum of change. Unless the techniques that make television teaching more effective are used… and unless enough time is devoted to lesson preparation, the true effectiveness of the medium will remain unknown.” (p. 250).

Change a few words, and these findings could be as valid today as they were in 1964!

Kiinescope – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinescope