Hello Africa, let's chat!!

        As a parting shot in my previous post http://www.calmet.org/2014/05/weather-briefing-using-chat.html I did somehow make a promise that I would implement and apply, in the African region, the ‘Weather briefing using chat’ initiative which I learnt from EUMETSAT Trainers. I got to participate and host a Weather briefing during the WMO Train the Trainer online course in May 2014 and recently, the Institute for Meteorological Training and Research (WMO-RTC) in conjunction with EUMETSAT held the online phase of IMTR EUMETSAT–Satellite Applications Course which ran for five weeks. On 17 July 2014 I was lucky enough to squeeze in a few hours during the course to host another Weather briefing chat using Google presentations and Moodle for the chat. 
      The weather briefing had about ten participants online from all over Africa: Botswana, Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, Malawi, Rwanda, Sudan and Zimbabwe and was synchronous for an hour and left open for discussions and questions for a couple of more hours The participants were very active and engaged in the whole discussion and this I would attribute to not only the fact that the recent course was primarily for Satellite Application and the audience was ready to get engaged and actively participate in interpreting the satellite images but also the fact that they all came from the African region and were familiar with the climatology. 

Screen shot during the presentation

       Each and every time that one hosts the session, one gets to take away a bit of knowledge from the experience. There are always challenges the notorious one being internet connectivity. Another challenge was the pace of the presentation which most of the participants found alright but some found it abit pacy. Taiwo from Nigeria said “Thank you for the weather briefing, it was always a pleasure participating although I found it pacy a bit and was slow following you yesterday but went through it later and I was able to grasp one or two things.” To ensure that we were all on the same 'page', I would guide the participants by mentioning the slide number which we would currently be discussing, paused to allow them to navigate to the slide.
      This presentation taught me to always prepare your audience few weeks earlier since it is a synchronous activity for a specific time and would require the audience to be online at the same time. Secondly, it is always good to have about 5 to 10 slides especially when you have an active audience so that you may have ample time for discussions and conclusions. All in all, it was a great experience for the participants and me too. This mode of Weather briefing is very convenient and I would hope to see more Meteorologists applying it not only for Weather briefings but also for discussions and presentations.

Exercise ambassadeur style

As a radar instructor at the Nordic "NOMEK course", I fine-tuned the style of this year´s exercise.
The style of the exercise I call "ambassadeur style".

Approximately 25 persons were divided into 5 groups, each provided with a different radar exercise. The radar exercise consisted of images of different radar products from one or more different weather situations. The task were to recognize the present meteorological phenomenons, and if so, explain why it could be seen in one product and not in another.

After 6-7 minutes I interrupted them with:

"Each group now has to find an ambassadeur of your group. Some of you might feel shy or in general do not like to do this. If you feel this way, please volunteer now - this is just to be nice to you, because the exercise is not over yet!
As an ambassadeur, you bring your exercise number/material with you to the next group. Let your new group fellows interpret your exercise. Help and add if necessary".

Ambassadeur/Exercise 1 moved to group 2, Ambassadeur/Exercise 2 moved to group 3,...., Ambassadeur/Exercise 5 moved to group 1.

I let the groups work with their new exercise for 6-7 minutes.
Then I interrupted again.

The style was repeated, with emphasis that "the 2nd shyest person should volunteer now".

Then the new ambassadeur of group 2 took exercise 1 with him/her to group 3, etc.

Again the groups had 6-7 minutes for interpreting their new exercise.

Last interruption: "now a 3rd person should volunteer to be ambassadeur, and this time the most EAGER person should volunteer".
Before I finished talking, some of these 3rd ambassadeurs began moving on to the next group, as the thought the had got the concept now. I had to stop them, and tell "you don´t know what you volunteered to do. You volunteered to present/explain the exercise to all of us up here in front. If you need help from the audience, don´t hesitate to ask them".

These 3rd ambassadeurs did really fine, and the whole exercise style finished in a positive, active and enthusiastic atmosphere, thanks to the participant´s engagement!

Birgitte Knudsen
Aviation forecaster & radar coordinator
Danish Meteorological Institute

Learnopoly - a game of learning activities

Learnopoly is a game created for exercising skills for instructional design, where competing teams of players race to design learning activities for a set of given topics. Design constraints are determined randomly, by dealing cards and spinning a wheel. The cards decide the topic and type of activity that must be designed, and the spin decides the learning solution--whether the activity will be carried out either synchronously online, asynchronously online, or in a classroom. The purpose of the game is to offer a creative challenge to players to use different learning activities for different learning solutions in effective and engaging ways. Too often we chose learning solutions only because we have tried them already and are comfortable with them. Learnopoly offers a safe and entertaining environment where players have the opportunity to challenge themselves to think out of the box.

Learnopoly - the game of learning activities from Kuna & Parrish

Learnopoly was introduced as a workshop activity at the recent 2014 Eumetcal Workshop held in Warsaw, Poland, from 10 to 13 June. Over 30 players tried out the game, successfully came up with a great set of solutions, and provided useful feedback for improvements.

Spin the wheel

Real life puts constraints on our training projects, usually for good reasons, but not always. In Learnopoly these constraints are determined randomly, which frees (or forces) participants to prepare themselves for those situations in which they will need or want to attempt something different. 

After an introduction to the goals and basic rules, the following game items were distributed to each team:

• Two sets of cards - Learning activities and Topics (job responsibilities requiring training). Learning activities ranged from discussions to simulations. The topics were varied to cater to a range of a team member expertise, from aeronautical forecasting to disaster response.
• Learning Solution Spinner - The spinner randomly selected the Classroom, an Online synchronous course, or an Online asynchronous course as the context for the learning activity.
• Answer sheets to be used by the teams to describe the learning activities they created, according to stated criteria and to achieve a learning outcome appropriate for the selected Topic on one of their cards.
• A board that helped the team track the points awarded and combinations of Learning activities and Learning solutions used. Some combinations earned bonus points.

The player goals were to beat the time constraints and the other teams in coming up with the most and best learning activities. How were the winners chosen? There were two official ways to win, two goals to accomplish:

1) Design the most learning activities in the time allotted and collect the most points. A team was lucky if it randomly chose a combination of a Learning activity and Learning solution that granted them the opportunity to earn bonus points.

2) Design the best (most effective and engaging) learning activity. These were voted by the other teams at the end of the session, after each team nominated one of the activities they had created and described it aloud.

Nightmare on the shift