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Show Elementary Teacher May Be Whiz at Mechanical Things It's getting so the elementary teacher has to be an amateur engineer en-gineer these days. It hasn't quite yet reached the point where engineering courses are ! required of her, but with all the mechanical and electronic classroom tools she's responsible for" it may come to that soon. In fact, she might even be able to advise you on the vagaries va-garies of your home movie projector pro-jector when you visit school. For, besides film projectors, the teacher also runs and occasionally occa-sionally gives first aid to phonographs, pho-nographs, radios, TV sets, tape recorders and even teaching machines, in some places. 1 Says an expert on technology in the classrooms, the schools need even more of these items. Dr. James D. Finn, professor profes-sor of education at the University Univer-sity of Southern California and director of the Technological Development Project of the Na-, Na-, tional Education Association, says the schools need more of the new tools to teach more of the children more things better and faster. Up to now he says, the schools have invested about $272 million mil-lion in classroom technological aids. Some $35 million of that was added in the last school year alone. More and more is needed, he warns, or American schools won't be able to live up to their potential. Educational TV stations are worthless to the schools, he says, unless the schools have TV sets. Films and film strips are useless without film projectors to show them. Good foreign language teaching requires language laboratories lab-oratories containing enough tape recorders for students to work with. So many students are entering enter-ing the public schools that the schools have to run faster and faster in order to merely stand still. More teachers, alone, can't help, he says, for new teachers are being overwhelmed by the wave of students, longer school years, and the growing length of the average student's stay in the school. That's where technology comes in by helping, provide more and better learning in less time. Right along with technological aids in the classroom will probably prob-ably be the teacher, textbook in one hand, screwdriver in the other. |