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.