The Safety Training Net -July '24 🌪️🔥☁️👜
Disaster Preparedness and Activities, Overheating Infographic, Word Cloud Activities, ASSP Conference, What's In Your Bag, and Links
According to FEMA, the definition of a disaster is “an event in which a community undergoes severe danger and incurs, or is threatened to incur, such losses to persons and/or property that the resources available within the community are severely taxed.” Disaster preparedness takes many forms, and often, our first experience with it is a fire drill when we start school as a child. Knowing what to do and when to do it, whether it is before, during, or after, is critical. One way to show others what is important and make the information stick is through active participation. If school children were simply told what to do and where to go in the event of a fire, this critical information would not be as clearly understood. The same is true for adults in the workplace. Safety and health professionals know that and have been using hands-on lessons and more advanced learning activities like tabletop drills for a long time.
While I discuss tabletop drills in my book "Make Your Safety Training Stick: Improve Retention and Get Better Results,” I am not going into those details here. Instead, I am sharing an idea for a favorite activity that can be adapted to disaster preparedness education.
The activity is a combination scavenger hunt and escape room. (Both of these were described separately in past newsletters, and if you are interested, you can download those activities at the links below).
You can download a sample fire safety escape room activity here.
You can download instructions for creating a QR Scavenger Hunt here.
For VIP Subscribers, I have created a new activity, "Disaster Detective: Solve for Safety,” which provides everything needed to use a scavenger hunt/escape room as part of a disaster preparedness training class. The download link can be found in the VIP section below.
To create your own scavenger hunt/escape room activity for a disaster preparedness class, think about 6-10 key locations related to disaster preparedness. For example, a meet-up point, control panels, and shelter locations are possibilities. Next, create a clue for each location and place that clue in a different location. To start the activity, give trainees the first clue, which will lead them to the first key location, where they will find the next clue, and so on. Details can be found in the two activities listed above. To add in characteristics of an escape room, make the clues more challenging such as providing a puzzle or rhyme that must be solved. The possibilities are endless as are the customization options for your organization. If you want to see a sample “game plan” for a scavenger hunt/escape room activity, check out my latest blog post on the SafetyFUNdamentals website.
Overheating Infographic
We are in the middle of summer, and most people have experienced more than a few very hot days. While we often talk about preventing heat stress, it’s also important to talk about the hazards of overheating. As you will see in the following infographic, the highest overheating extremes are described. To use this in a safety training class, share the infographic with a training class and review the key points. Next, give a copy of the related infographic training activity to each trainee (or teams of trainees) and ask them to complete the missing information without referring to the original infographic. Once everyone is finished, review the correct answers with the group.
To download this infographic and infographic training activity, click here.
Here are a few links to check out:
A Win for Safety (a new podcast by Tanya Conole)
Ai Sound Generator (could be used to create background sounds for elearning and in-person classes)
How Products Are Made (could be used to share different manufacturing processes with trainees and then they could be asked to identify potential hazards and solutions)
What’s In Your Bag?
Each month, I highlight a subscriber and share what they carry with them so they are prepared for anything while on the road. Special thanks to Stacey Brooks for agreeing to be featured this month!
What’s in Your Bag?
Using Word Cloud Generators for Training Activities
There are many word cloud generators available online, both free and for a fee. While these can be a good way to add interactivity by soliciting feedback during a presentation, they can also be used as a learning activity. Consider asking the following questions and then sharing the results in a Word Cloud.
What are the three most important ideas from this class?
At the beginning of a training session, ask participants to share the topic they want most to learn about
Ask a quiz question to the group and have them share their answer
Ask participants to share the one thing that they would buy to make their workplace safer
Show two pre-prepared word clouds with one including different hazards and one including corrective measures. Ask teams of trainees to pick one word from each cloud and state how they go together.
Below is a list of WordCloud creators you can check out.
WordClouds (my favorite)
Will I see you in Denver next week?
Many of the thousands of subscribers to this newsletter are also members of the American Society of Safety Professionals (ASSP) and ASSP’s annual conference will be held next week, August 6th-8th, in Denver, CO. I am looking forward to seeing many of you! (I will have something with me for subscribers so if you see me, please stop and say hello!) I will be presenting Take Your Training and Communication Skills to the Next Level on Wednesday August 6th at 1:45PM in the Colorado Convention Center, Room Four Seasons 2. I hope to see many of you there!