INTEGRATION OF TECHNOLOGY IN

Ted Williams

Planetarium Director / Mallon Planetarium / Methacton School District

Project MC76 / PHILADELPHIA UNIVERSITY / Summer  2002

This paper will focus on current and emerging trends in instructional technology as they relate to planetarium education utilized in primary and secondary education. It will address planetarium directors and those in the planetarium field that want to gain an overview of instructional technology and its impact on their environment.

In many of our job descriptions you will find responsibilities listed  requiring skills such as: planetarium operation, design and delivery of presentations, or the design of outreach astronomy programs.  These descriptions many times include the selection and maintenance of related technologies.    Many of the presentations we author, coordinate, produce and deliver in the planetarium environment are by definition instructional designs. 

On the job, we pull together an array of multi-media, and related technologies under a virtual sky (the planetarium).  We deliver and enhance instruction about our place within, and how we relate to the universe.  We enable visitors to construct mental and sometimes physical models demonstrating the motions of the Earth in its solar system.     

The environment created by the planetariums we work in, aids in the process.    Students can identify with what they see in the sky on a daily/nightly basis, and expand their awareness of their position in the universe.  When delivered with proper instructional strategies which include aspects of entertainment, the planetarium becomes a proven effective tool.  It can increase student motivation and inspire further self exploration of astronomical science.

By description then, the planetarium director is an instructional technologist.  We can be guided to higher levels of excellence utilizing the theory of instructional systems design.  ISD (through the process of analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation) becomes integral to the success of our programs.  Many of us have intuitively figured this out whether we address it as ISD or not. 

Currently we see trends that  have reduced our staffing.  School systems that do not see value in the environment will close the facilities due to their inherent costs and difficulty in finding properly trained staff for their facilities.  Many facilities operate with directors that were appointed, sometimes as transfers from unrelated fields.   Most of us constitute one-person planetarium operations.  This has caused the role of many planetarium directors to be multi-faceted. Many positions now require us to take the role of instructional technologist and instructional designer.  As an instructional designer, we must become familiar with emerging technologies and how to effectively use them to augment the presentations we design and deliver.