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| Participants at the two-day event |
By ROMMY IMAH
In keeping with its determination to contribute its quota to empowering the Nigerian journalist, Microsoft Nigeria has partnered KarRox Technologies Limited, to deliver a two-day IT training workshop to 20 journalists drawn from major media houses in Nigeria.
The workshop, which was a capacity-building programme designed to provide journalists with essential IT skills using Microsoft technologies to enable them work effectively took place at the KarRox Technologies Training Centre at Ikeja, Lagos.
Dele Akinsade Technology Lead, Microsoft Anglophone West Africa in explaining the reason for the programme said “As a technology enabler, we believe IT capacity building contributes significantly to economic empowerment, growth and development, and will offer the appropriate skills to the media to use technology in innovative ways”.
Some of the courses taken at the two-day workshop included a session on Microsoft Windows Live Suite, a software which provides a platform for building online communities and offers free online storage and sharing facilities, and tools for blogging; Microsoft OneNote which is an effective tool for recording, collating and sharing notes.
OneNote is particularly advantageous to journalists as it enables audio and video recording which is useful for recording interviews. The tool also enables interview transcription and uses search tools. The facilitators of the workshop were trainers from KarRox Technologies which is known for its world class IT training.
The major highlight of the workshop was the session on social media tools aimed at enabling the journalists to leverage web-based technologies for their reporting as is obtainable in many developed and developing nations across the world.
A course on “The Power of Blogging” was delivered by Shittu Sherrif, renowned blogger and CEO of Web Trends Nigeria, whilst KarRox Technologies trainers gave a course on “Creating a Personal Website”.
Social media has become increasingly popular with the growth of social networking as a channel of communications; the use of blog posts and social networking sites have become a major medium for sharing of information, videos and pictures. There are over 2 million Nigerians on Facebook and other social media platforms like MySpace, Twitter and still growing with several uploads from Nigerians on YouTube.
Prince Osita Ike, guest facilitator and a veteran photographer took the journalists through an interactive but exciting session on Photojournalism.
Pritesh Zaveri, Business Development Manager, KarRox Technologies Limited, said, “We are pleased to partner with Microsoft on this training project with the Nigerian media. The benefits of IT education cannot be underestimated and we feel this is a good way to positively impact their contributions to the society.”
Participating journalists commended the continuous efforts of Microsoft and KarRox at encouraging technology penetration as well as personal growth of their partners.
Lucas Ajanaku of the Nigeria Compass said “I thank Microsoft for this opportunity. It has been a very enlightening experience. We now have a better understanding of Microsoft software packages and the opportunities that exist in online and social media as an effective communication channel. IT skills are certainly a prerequisite for future achievement”.
Participants were drawn from various media houses such as The Punch, The Guardian, Daily Independent, Champion newspapers, BusinessDay Newspapers, ThisDay, ICT Today, The Sun and Vanguard Newspapers amongst others.
Certificates of participation were given to all the journalists at the end of the two-day workshop.
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