WASHINGTON COUNTY CLOSED CIRCUIT TELEVISION REPORT - 1963

 

NOTE:

This publication was produced by the School System. – A very informative Historical, six-year article.

 

 

 

The Board of Education first consid­ered using television in the schools in 1954. The Board was then aware that the children of the 1950's came to school with a better background of information than earlier generations-and that a pri­mary reason for this was exposure to new experiences via television in the home. This situation suggested a need for cur­riculum changes to avoid trying to teach children things they already knew. It also suggested that television might be even more valuable in the classroom than in the living room.

 

The Board was unaware of it then, but a movement was underway to set up a project which could explore the uses of television for instruction. Backing this project was a joint committee formed by the Electronic Industries Association and the Ford Foundation's Fund for the Ad­vancement of Education, with a number of consultants representing various edu­cational agencies. The committee wanted to start a large-scale project-something that would provide a comprehensive test of television. The emphasis was to be on regular, direct instruction by television rather than on occasional or supplemen­tal uses of it.

 

Washington County was ultimately chosen as the site of this project on the basis of a proposal to use television for instruction at all grade levels and in basic subject areas; to use it for teacher educa­tion and for improvement and enrich­ment of the curriculum. The county also proposed to test television's usefulness in relieving classroom and teacher shortages and in achieving better use of community and school resources. And finally, it pro­posed to find out whether instruction by television was economical.

 

This study, the Washington County Closed-Circuit Educational Television Project, was an exploratory and practical experience - not a formal research experiment. It extended over a period of five years, 1956-1961, and included the schools of an entire county school system. The project program developed as a natu­ral outgrowth of the curriculum improve­ment program which had been evolving over a period of many years. Television lessons were scheduled regularly to make them integral parts of courses, but at no grade level did they occupy a major portion of a school day. The telecasts did not prevent pupils from having personal contacts with teachers and from engaging in the give and take of classroom discus­sions. The television experience was planned as only part of a total learning experience for the pupil.

 

The project got underway in the sum­mer of 1956. One hundred teachers, prin­cipals, supervisors and community lead­ers gathered at a workshop in July and August to plan the new television instruc­tion program. At the same time a team of Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company engineers under William C. Warman began stringing cable for the television network; and John R. Brugger left his post as chief radio and television engineer at the University of Illinois to design and install the transmission cen­ter. The installation was completed that fall in time for telecasting to eight schools. The system was expanded until by September 1963, every public school in the county was linked to the television circuit.

 

As the project developed, television came steadily into use at all grade levels and in most subject areas. Television in­struction was coordinated by staff mem­bers T. Wilson Cahall and Robert F. Lesher. Each summer and at times during the school year, teachers, principals, parents, supervisors and administrators gathered to assess progress and to re­study courses and teaching methods. New courses were added, old ones altered -until today more than fifty courses are included in the television program. By the time the project's official life came to an end in 1961, the county not only had a new teaching aid in the classroom, but also was well on the way toward having a vastly improved curriculum and a new approach to teaching-by teams. The advantages of television were apparent and the cost low enough so that after outside financing had ended, the county was able to continue and even expand its use of television in the classroom.

 

Throughout the five years of the proj­ect, the county school system received support from two major sponsors-the Electronic Industries Association and the Fund for the Advancement of Education. Invaluable assistance also came from the Chesapeake and Potomac Telephone Company of Maryland.

 

The Electronic Industries Association, representing major electronics companies, provided free of charge the necessary television cameras; receivers; and studio, control room, projection and recording equipment. Seventy-five manufacturers donated the equipment valued at $300,000.

 

The Fund for the Advancement of Education and the Ford Foundation un­derwrote other project expenses. These included the costs of designing the sys­tem, administering and supervising the project, providing secretarial help, pay­ing cable rental fees, securing additional television sets, solving various production problems, training technical personnel, and carrying out the evaluation program. The Fund and the Foundation together contributed about $200,000 a year to the project over the five-year period.

 

The Chesapeake and Potomac Tele­phone Company, with technical advice from Bell Laboratories, developed the closed-circuit system for transmitting television to the classroom. This system included more than 115 miles of coaxial cable plus transmitting and amplifying equipment.

 

THE SYSTEM AND THE STAFF

To many educators, the most unfamil­iar and perhaps worrisome aspect of classroom television is the system itself. It is a complex electronic affair, with strange devices and odd terms like "vide­con," "zoom" and "dolly out." Yet the actual task of operating such a system is not as forbidding as it might sound. Washington County has found that it can operate an extensive closed-circuit sys­tem with a minimum of professional and technical assistance. Many other school systems are probably in a position to do the same.

 

In the completed system in Washing­ton County, forty-five schools are linked by coaxial cable to form a closed-circuit television network. Six lessons can be sent simultaneously over this cable and picked up on more than 800 standard twenty-one-inch television sets in class­rooms, school cafeterias and auditoriums throughout the county. Many classrooms are equipped with two sets, so that no pupil has to sit far from the screen. Audi­toriums and other large viewing rooms are equipped with several sets, generally one for every twenty-five children. Large screens are now being used to replace small receiving sets in auditoriums and other large viewing areas

 

The lessons are transmitted from a Television Center adjacent to the Board of Education offices in Hagerstown. This center is a pre-fabricated metal building with a concrete block addition covering an area of 100 by 125 feet. A few years ago it had a dirt floor and housed farm equipment. Now it contains five tele­vision studios. Three of these are twenty-five by thirty feet, and two are forty feet square-large enough to permit the use of an automobile or truck for demonstra­tions. From these studios more than twenty-five lessons a day or 125 a week are transmitted to schools. These lessons are for the most part live telecasts. The Columbia Broadcasting System, operat­ing day and night seven days a week, pro­duces about 140 live programs, while National Broadcasting Corporation in the same period transmits about sixty.

 

The center also contains offices for pro­duction, engineering, supervisory and clerical personnel, and a film projection room. Slides and films are stored, re­paired and previewed in the film room from which they can be fed either into any of the five studios or directly to the schools over the closed-circuit system. Adjacent to the Television Center is an­other pre-fabricated metal building 100 by 40 feet, which contains office space for the studio teachers, plus a workroom for the art staff.

 

Before installing a television system for classroom instruction, it is first necessary

to decide whether it shall be a closed- or open-circuit system. The open-circuit system requires no cable, thus eliminat­ing cable rental costs. But this system provides a single transmission channel, so that only one lesson can be telecast at a time. The closed-circuit system permits transmitting six or more lessons at a time and since Washington County wanted to make extensive use of tele­vision for teaching, it chose the closed ­circuit system.

At the time the Board of Education asked the Chesapeake and Potomac Tele­phone Company to install this system, in June of 1956, there was considerable question as to whether it could be done economically. One engineer, for example, made a guess that cable rental costs for such a system would amount to $2,500,­000 a year and capital costs to $7,000,000 or $8,000,000. His estimate made sense in terms of costs then being experienced by the major networks; and there was no other experience on which to base an estimate. No one had yet built an eco­nomical closed-circuit system of the size and quality needed in Washington County.

 

But whereas the major networks transmit over a system combining expensive underground cable and microwave re­lays, the Telephone Company ultimately worked out for Washington County a system using a simplified coaxial cable. The cable rental cost is about $150,000 a year, or one-seventeenth of the $2,500,­000 estimate. This made all the differ­ence between a practical and an impracti­cal system. The completed network, in fact, represented an electronic engineer­ing milestone, and systems built since have been modeled upon it. The Tele­phone Company used its Washington County experience to formulate the rate schedule that is now being used nation­wide for its closed-circuit service.

 

The television network first reached 6,000 pupils in 1956, then 12,000 in 1957, 16,500 in 1958, 18,000 in 1961, and 20,500 in 1963. The quality of the sys­tem has been improved steadily, and while it is not without flaw, it is highly reliable and generally excellent. The chief engineer estimates the system's reliabil­ity at better than 99%, which means that breakdowns are extremely rare.

 

 

Operating this system requires a sub­stantial staff. A precise figure is hard to give because there is no definite line be­tween television personnel and non-tele­vision personnel. In all, there are about seventy people working most of the time in the television system-and this in­cludes teachers, supervisors, technical and clerical personnel, as follows:

 

A brief discussion of the duties of the coordinator and of the supervisory, pro­duction, engineering and art staffs fol­lows. While these departments are dis­cussed separately, in practice they work together very closely. The standard studio crew for telecasting a lesson in­cludes the teacher, two technicians, a director, a floor manager and two camera­men. All are interdependent.

 

COORDINATOR

The coordinator works directly under the assistant superintendent in charge of instruction as chief-of-staff for tele­vision. His duties induced coordination of the work of the departments of engineering, production and instruction.

 

INSTRUCTIONAL SUPERVISORY STAFF

A supervisor of television instruction works as a member of the county staff of general instructional supervisors. His re­sponsibilities to the studio faculty are similar to those of a principal in a con­ventional school. The entire group of instructional supervisors, however, provides assistance to studio teachers in the planning, teaching and evaluating of televised courses.

In addition to their other relationships with studio teachers, instructional supervisors arrange for them to meet with classroom teachers to discuss problems of mutual concern as members of a teaching team.

 

PRODUCTION STAFF

It is the teacher's responsibility to pre­sent the lesson and the engineer's job to transmit it, while it is the production staff's job to see that the lesson is pre­sented as effectively as possible. The task of the production staff is not easily defined. The teacher is, essentially, the equivalent of the commercial station's producer. He decides what his lesson is to include, and no techniques of produc­tion are allowed to violate the teacher's conception of the method and principles of teaching involved. The director is there to help the teacher work effectively -to help him use television's many capa­bilities. Production techniques are de­signed to implement the teacher's con­ception of the lesson.

 

The teacher new to television has much to learn about teaching in a studio situa­tion. He must modify his habits of walk­ing and talking. He must learn the skills of interviewing, working with a studio crew, using studio cues and signals and teaching with a variety of visual aids. This does not imply that the television teacher must become a professional actor. It means mastering simple techniques such as walking slowly enough for the camera to follow smoothly, and gesturing in such a way that the camera does not distort the arm or hand. The teacher must also learn how to prepare a script outline. The script is necessary not only as a guide for the teacher but also as a cue to let the director know what the teacher plans to do, and when. If the teacher intends to walk from one part of the studio to another, the director must know when, so that he can have the cameras in readiness. If films, slides or other kinds of visual aids are to be used, the script must indicate to the director when and where in the sequence of the lesson they are to come.

 

At the Television Center, two experi­enced supervisors head the production staff. They also teach communications courses for the Hagerstown Junior Col­lege. Most of their staff of thirty is made up of junior college students, about half of whom are majoring in communications. In addition to the two supervisors, there are five full-time and three part-time directors. The rest of the staff is made up of cameramen and floor managers who assist the director. The fact that many of the students are studying communica­tions at the junior college is a great ad­vantage in training them for work at the Television Center.

 

About half of the production crewmen are new at the beginning of each school year. Many of them arrive at the Tele­vision Center less than two weeks before school opens, knowing only how to oper­ate the family television set. In twelve days they are operating cameras with considerable skill. Ninety per cent of the television lessons are live. The rest are taped on occasions when the teacher must be absent at the usual lesson time, wishes to interview a resource person at his convenience or desires to evaluate his telecast as it is received in a classroom situation.

 

ENGINEERING STAFF

The Chesapeake and Potomac Tele­phone Company carries all responsibility for the maintenance and operation of the cable and the system amplifying equip­ment. All other equipment-television cameras, receivers, projection, recording, studio and control room equipment-is the responsibility of the chief engineer and his assistants. They maintain equip­ment and supervise the transmission of the audio and video signals.

 

The engineer and his assistant super­vise the staff of technicians who have varied responsibilities.

The Engineering Department, like the Production Department, trains its own personnel. With the exception of the chief engineer and his assistant, all are junior college students or recent high school graduates. Not infrequently these students go on to careers in electronics.

 

1. The film room operator

 

2. The video-tape recorder technician

 

3. The audio-video operators

 

4. The maintenance crewmen

 

ART STAFF

The Art Department provides a num­ber of important services. There are three full-time staff members in this depart­ment, all recent high school graduates talented in art. They prepare most of the maps, charts, diagrams, acetate overlays, special illustrations, models, and backgrounds for sets and similar material used by the teachers in more than fifty televised courses. While much commercially-pro­duced illustrative material is available; often it is not suitable for television. Many maps are too detailed, and illus­trations are not proportioned for the television screen, which requires a height /­width ratio of three to four. Worthwhile illustrative material can often be pro­duced much more cheaply than it can be purchased. Having the Art Department makes it possible for teachers to be much more flexible in planning graphic mate­rials for their lessons-a vital advantage if the most effective use is to be made of television.

 

TELEVISION IN THE SCHOOLS

The "correct" way to fit television into the conventional school routine will prob­ably be debated for years to come. The proper length of the television lesson, the optimum size for the television class ­opinions about these and other problems may ultimately fill volumes. No one now has had enough experience to know the best conclusions.

Nevertheless, a few things do seem clear. One is that television should not take up a major portion of any pupil's school day; television is best used as a specialized kind of learning experience or as an aid to classroom instruction. The other is that a television lesson should generally be followed as soon as possible by a session with the classroom teacher.

But there is now no easy answer to the question of how long a television lesson should be. The fact that the attention span of a first grader is shorter than that of a high school pupil has bearing on the question. So does the fact that pupils at the same grade level can profit by a longer television lesson in a subject like art, than in others, such as conversational French, where more concentration is re­quired.

At present elementary pupils spend 7.3 % to 13 % of their classroom time watching television lessons. These les­sons, ranging in length from thirteen to twenty-five minutes, are followed by work in the subject with the classroom teacher. Junior high school pupils spend almost one-third of their time in tele­vision classes, while high school pupils seldom spend more than 10% of their time in television classes.

 

 

None of these time periods are recom­mended as the ideal. The staff is inclined to believe that the amount of television viewing time in the elementary schools is satisfactory. Junior high schools may have too much viewing time, while high school pupils might profitably spend more time than they now do.

The flexibility of the elementary school day makes it much easier to use tele­vision there than in the junior or senior high school. Since there are no rigidly defined periods in the elementary school, the classroom teacher can devote as much or as little time as he deems necessary to preparation for the television lesson, or to discussion and other follow-up work. The junior and senior high school sched­ules, on the other hand, are relatively inflexible. When the day is made up of six periods of equal length, both tele­vision and classroom teachers are more limited in what they can do.

 

In certain subjects, television is obviously very successful. In others, it is less so, although it appears that in no subject does television fail to produce results at least as good as those achieved when classroom instruction alone is used. There are many on the county staff now who believe that any well taught subject will be effective on television, and that failures are caused by unsatisfactory presentation, not by weaknesses inherent in television. It is certainly true that no one should judge hastily whether or not a course is suitable for television. Many teachers in Washington County who thought that arithmetic could not be taught successfully on television have changed their minds, because test results have made it quite clear that elementary pupils made much more rapid progress in arithmetic with television than they did without it.

 

TEACHERS AND TELEVISION

The impact of television on the Wash­ington County school system has been far greater than anyone could have predicted in 1956. Nowhere has this impact been more obvious than in the area of teaching and teaching methods.

Television has made the talents of some' of the county's teachers far more widely available than they were before. This benefits not only the pupils, but also many other teachers who, for the first time, have an opportunity to watch their colleagues at work. When this first hap­pened, teachers with thirty years' experi­ence sometimes discovered, often to their surprise, that there were quite a few teaching techniques they had not known about. Before television, these teachers had to depend largely on theory and experience to guide them. Now they have a daily opportunity to watch and weigh the methods and theories of others, and to see how these work out in prac­tice. For most teachers, this has been an enlightening experience. It has provided on-the-job training never before possible.

An even more notable change brought by television has been the establishment of teaching teams. The teacher in the studio and the teachers in the classroom comprise the team.

Undoubtedly, Television has a place in the instructional program of the school.Television adds a new dimension to the instructional program. Through the use of visuals and other techniques unique to television, classroom television provides experiences for Washington County pupils that could not be achieved in other ways.

 

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