Fulldome Video

This article is called Fulldome Video and is written by Linda E. Law.

The very fun thing that the Fulldome video system has to offer is the fact that the students enjoy it immensely. They sit back, turn off the lights, and show a film of the galaxy for example then your students feel much stronger about the subject that is being shown on the screen. Instead of your students becoming restless and bored, they are quiet and focused and caught up in what they are watching. After the film is shown on the full dome video system the questions start and the students truly are way more interested in what they witnessed. The students see the items on the screen as life like so therefore they can picture for example how large they would be in space. Apparently many schools have started using this program and it has been a very powerful way of teaching. The systems range from 20-40 thousand dollars, but you do get what you pay for. The 3D images are visually studied and the stories are very engaging when they are viewed in the full dome. It is the teachers’ responsibility to provide the students with a tool that they can comprehend and enjoy. "The innovative teachers who take on the ground-breaking work of introducing this technology to their classrooms will be rewarded by classes of students who are eager to come to school to learn" (Law,4).

This article is very interesting to me because I have never heard of or seen one of these before. These Full Dome systems are large inflatable rooms that can be placed in the gym or in a designated room. I cannot even imagine how much fun this would be as a student showing up and then walking into a 10 foot tall inflatable door and entering into a dome where bean bags and comfort is given to you. All of the students will sit down and look around because they may be surrounded by planets or possibly be surrounded by the world with the equator’s circumference around them. If my school has the Fulldome where I teach in the near future, I will make sure all of my students are comfortable and we will study geology for example. I will get a video or slides of different rocks and crystals that I can show the class with great detail on the projector. I will put them into groups and have each group study one of the rocks that is projected on the Fulldome. The students will learn where they can find the rocks and what they are. They will then share with the class what it is that they saw and all of the students will get a very thorough analysis of each. You can use the Fulldome projector system for many subjects, yet it is mostly used for geology, chemistry and history. The only issue to this technology technique is that it is very expensive and would have to be used frequently to get the monies worth.