How Telecommunications is impacting Ontario’s Far North
First published in Thunder Bay’s Chronicle-Journal newspaper on Saturday, October 16, 2004 (Page A7) as a Guest Column by Geordi Kakepetum, Keewaytinook Okimakanak’s Executive Director.
As Thunder Bay Telephone adopts a new course ("TbayTel aims to keep up with times" - C-J, Sept 29), it’s important to consider some of the opportunities that information communication technologies (ICTs) offer for community-based development.
Keewaytinook Okimakanak (the Northern Chiefs Council) was created more than 10 years ago to bring support services and other applications including connectivity and ICTs to our member First Nation communities in Ontario’s Far North. Back then, many of our communities did not even have residential telephone service. Our leadership understood that a technological revolution was taking place that we could not afford to miss.
To learn more, our chiefs travelled by bus to witness a demonstration of tele-medicine in Ottawa. They watched as a cardiologist at the Heart Institute diagnosed a patient in the Northwest Territories. Our leadership immediately saw the potential of such a tool to imporove the lives of people in Ontario’s Far North.
Since then, Keewaytinook Okimakanak (KO) (http://knet.ca) has become a leader in First Nation connectivity and telecommunications. We operate KNet Services (http://smart.knet.ca), a community-based telecommunications network, KO Telehealth (http://telehealth.knet.ca), and KiHS (http://kihs.knet.ca) to name just a few. Each of these applications was developed by our communities to address local needs.
I would like to share with you how education has changed in Ontario’s Far North because of this. Historically, our children had to leave their families and communities after they finished elementary school if they wanted to continue their education at high school in Sioux Lookout, Kenora or Thunder Bay. Not surprising many of these young people ran into trouble as they struggled to deal with the challenges of urban life.
Most of our communities simply could not support a full high school program because populations are small. Those communities with enough students to support a high school program could only afford to hire one or maybe two teachers. Like all rural and remote schools, our programs could not provide the full range of curriculum options that urban students take for granted. Further, it was difficult to hire and retain teachers to work under such conditions.
Keewaytinook Internet High School (http://kihs.knet.ca) was created by our communities to address each of these challenges. KiHS now offers Grade 9 and 10 courses for those who wish to remain home for the first two years of high school.
KiHS is not a "cyber school" where teachers and students can only interact with each other via e-mails and web pages. KiHS is a high school with classrooms located in the thirteen partner First Nation communities across Northwestern Ontario.
KiHS students attend a regular classroom each day under the direction of a teacher accredited by the Ontario College of Teachers. Instead of trying to teach all subjects at every grade level, each teacher is responsible for teaching only two courses, one at the Grade 9 level and the other in Grade 10, in his or her area of specialization. The teacher in Fort Hope, for example, teaches computer science to all of the students across the KiHS network via the Internet and videoconferencing.
How successful is KiHS? This program has been operating for only three years so it has not been objectively evaluated yet. We would like to know if smaller class sizes and the opportunities for on-on-one mentoring better prepares our students for the remaining years of high school. We would like to know how successful our students are when they graduate and move towards college, university and beyond.
Nevertheless, KiHS has achieved a number of its original objectives. It keeps our youth at home under the guidance of their parents and grandparents during those critical early teenage years. Would you want your children to leave home to attend Grade 9? Would you want them to board with strangers?
Many First Nation students who travel south to attend high school drop out shortly after September and return home. Without KiHS, these students would have nothing to do except get into trouble. KiHS allows these students to save their year by achieving at least some of their credits.
Some complete the maximum number of credits available. Many of these young people choose to remain KiHS students for Grade 10. There is pressure from the Chiefs and parents to expand KiHS to include Grade 11 and 12. If the program was not meeting their needs and expectations, our enrolment would not grow every year.
KiHS is just ne of the ICT applications that Keewaytinook Okimakanak has developed to serve the needs of our members. Like KiHS, KO Telehealth links via videoconferencing the sick and injured in 24 First Nations in the Sioux Lookout Zone with physicians and specialists in Winnipeg, Thunder Bay and Toronto. KNet Services is a community-based telecommunications network that is now supporting "Voice-over-Internet" telephony, videoconferencing, web pages and e-mail to name just a few of the services that we provide to First Nations people.