:
15
available to schools on loan and has encouraged schools to use such
equipment by producing material to support new curriculum initiatives
(early examples being the English language tapes produced in the mid-
1960s to support the then-current structural approach to language teaching,
and the films designed to demonstrate new techniques for teaching
mathematics and to explain the underlying concepts of the design and
technology course when it was introduced). This aspect of the
Department's work is carried out in close co-ordination with the CDC,
and additional support of a particularly valuable kind has been made
available to teachers in recent years by the establishment of the Media
Production Services Unit, where teachers are able to learn how to make
their own audio-visual aids using inexpensive materials and techniques.
Resources technology is well developed and reasonably well understood
by teachers but a good deal of work still lies ahead in helping teachers
to understand the appropriate uses (and limitations) of resource materials.
Libraries in schools.
7.19
The Department is now able to turn its attention to a feature
of education to which it was formerly not possible to accord a high
school libraries. The 1980 Green Paper includes proposals
priority
for strengthening class libraries in primary schools, and in order to
ascist schools in the development of library services, a library section
with a staff of six (including a qualified librarian) has been
established in the Advisory Inspectorate. In 1979 approval was given
for public-sector secondary schools with eighteen classes or more to
have a non-graduate teacher-librarian, and basic training was subsequently
provided for newly-appointed teacher-librarians by the Education Department
and the Extra-Mural Department of the University of Hong Kong.
resources generally, it is the imaginative use of books in the learning
process which needs to be emphasised in teacher education rather than
As with