Remote Teacher Training

Across four time zones, we shared our experience of teaching DIY satellite signal reception and decoding with Nature–Culture–Sustainability Studies Associate Professor and Coordinator Anastasiia Raina and Nature Lab Visualization and Imaging Research Associate Georgia Rhodes in the United States and school teacher Vladyslav Kachur in Ukraine.

We live-streamed Anastasiia and Georgia on the grass under the sun and cloud of Rhode Island as they received the first image of the workshop from NOAA-19. Three hours later we joined Vladyslav online, in the dark outside a school on the outskirts of Kyiv, as he received a second image from NOAA-19. The satellite had switched to night mode, transmitting a ghostly infrared image. Back indoors, we speculated if the meandering black line that we had all spotted was the Dnipro river.

As a remote training conducted across two continents, it was moving to experience how close and interconnected our four locations felt when mediated by the orbit of one satellite.