Reflections on My First DL

2020-07-13 16:23:37.000 – Nicole Tallman, Weather Observer/Education Specialist

Today I led my first distance-learning program since being hired as the Education Specialist. After many days fine-tuning my presentation and rehearsing to others and myself today was finally the day! In some ways, preparing for this DL was much like preparing a lesson for a classroom. 2 years of teaching definitely prepared me for this first step!

After creating the content, I had my presentation peer reviewed by coworkers. They were able to give me pointers on how to captivate the audience further and caught the mistakes I was overlooking. It’s always good to have a second set of eyes (or even a third) to overlook your work!

Once the presentation was set, I ran through the slides several times to solidify what I wanted to talk about for each one and made sure to keep it fun and entertaining! Some tips that I learned was to have an interesting background of a photo or video, little amount of text, and if possible use a prop! These tricks were things that I had noticed from my teaching days as well.

Weather Observer Nicole Tallman using the sling psychrometer during an ob

Once I felt that my DL program was perfect I rehearsed one more time and then I was set! This morning I refreshed a few key points and then it was time to put all of my hard work to the test. Today’s program was a program on Extreme Weather Obs where I featured how and why we as weather observers take hourly weather observations. This program was for one of our sponsors, MathWorks! I walked my viewers through the instruments used in weather observation as well as some of the importance of being a manual weather station at 6288’ elevation.

A photo used in my DL of the founding fathers of MWObs

A chart used in my DL to explain one of the reasons why Mount Washington sees severe weather

I get to continue practicing these skills moving forward for my next program (tomorrow’s program on Tropical Cyclones), as well as future programs like Science in the Mountains. I absolutely love to educate and to get people excited about weather and climate and hope that I influence my viewers through these DLs.

Nicole Tallman, Weather Observer/Education Specialist