There is only one week left to register your First Nation school's grade 8 class for the on-line Grade 8 supplementary english literacy material. This service is made available to First Nation schools by the Ontario Regional Management Organization (ON-RMO) for Industry Canada's First Nations SchoolNet program.

Check out the new web site for this on-line Grade 8 supplementary resource at http://g8.firstnationschools.ca

Click here for a poster describing how to register your grade 8 class.

Click here for more information about this on-line service.

2004 Budget Update - Changes to the Community Access and SchoolNet Programs

The following information is an update on the Budget 2004 funding allocation for the Community Access and SchoolNet programs. Click here for the full press release.

CAP and SchoolNet programs have new strategic directions, along with lower funding levels through fiscal years 2004-05 and 2005-06. The total of $50 million per year for two years is allocated both for financial contributions, as well as for internal operating and salary costs.

Funding for CAP will be $25 million per year for 2004-05 and 2005-06. Rather than supporting general public access to the Internet, CAP will focus on supporting public access sites that serve communities of greatest need (digital divide communities) as well as on supporting access to on-line government services. This will require both a shift in focus and a downsizing of the network.

Funding for the SchoolNet programs will be $25 million per year for 2004-05 and 2005-06, of which $15 million per year will be directed to First Nations SchoolNet. The new SchoolNet family will include the following programs: First Nations SchoolNet, Computers for Schools, Canada’s Campus Connection/Campus Canada, NetCorps Canada International, as well as related e-learning research and tools/standards development.

Keewaytinook Okimakanak is working with the First Nation SchoolNet program as the Regional Management Organization for Ontario. For more information, contact Brian Beaton at 877-737-KNET (5638).

KO Telehealth Website Launch

We are pleased to announce that the KO Telehealth Website has a new and improved look. This new website will act as a communication tool for all partners and stakeholders throughout the Sioux Lookout Health Zone. Our goal is to provide key up-to-date information that is useful and informative to educate all readers on Telehealth and what it can mean to improving and enhancing health care in First Nation communities.

Please visit http://telehealth.knet.ca to access information that relates to the integration of Telehealth into the Health Care Structure.

On the afternoon April 2, Jesse Fiddler, Cal Kenny and Leon Fiddler, along with members of Jesse's family (Angie, Mya and Keenan) met via video conference with a class of post-secondary Maori students from New Zealand. The laughter, sharing and exchanges went on for over an hour between the two groups. Click here is see some pictures from this meeting.

Below are some of the e-mail messages that lead to this exchange, explaining the objectives of the meeting. Click here to see an earlier story about this Maori Post-secondary institution.

----- Original Message -----

Kia ora koutou,

Once again I find myself saying thank you. Our students were really amazed at the whole experience and enjoyed the knowledge and stories that were shared. Today has set the benchmark and I look forward to more events in the future.

na
Graeme

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Jesse Fiddler (jessefiddler@knet.ca) wrote:

Hi Graeme,

Cal and myself would be interested in joining your class for that  session.  As Brian mentioned, Cal has been working on telling the story of  the Wasaho Cree Nation Traditional Lands through video and  websites (http://fortsevern.firstnation.ca/washaho).  I have some material on the legends from Sandy Lake (http://legends.knet.ca).  I can also talk about what other people and organizations have been doing in our area (http://sandylake.firstnation.ca).  Much of it was showcased at the Native Language gathering that we just had http://language.firstnationschools.ca

Jesse

----- Original Message -----

From: "Graeme Everton"  <graeme@everton.co.nz>
Sent: Monday, March 29, 2004 1:47 PM

Kia ora Brian,

Hope you have all recovered from the last few weeks of online activity. Thank you once again for giving us such a good and positive experience. It has certainly helped us focus our thoughts on where to with eLearning and the possibilities of video conferencing.

As indicated a week or so back I would like to ask if our students in  Maori Information Management (Diploma/Degree) can have the opportunity to talk with your team. The group is made up of Maori who are either Librarians or Archivists and are training to support Maori efforts to preserve Maori toanga (treasures) both physically and electronically. What I'm thinking is maybe talking about anything you have done to preserve the stories and knowledge of the tribes (the interactive river map for example). Do you have any Librarians or Archivists who would like to talk to us? We have a three hour class Saturday here/Friday afternoon your time and would love to fit you in for an hour

na
Graeme

Teachers, Teachers' aids and administrators gathered on April 2 at Pic River Elementary School near Marathon, Ontario to participate in the First Nations Schools Web Site Construction Workshop. The Pic River Elementary, Pic River High and Netamisakomik schools, each now have their own web site as a result of Industry Canada's First Nations SchoolNet program that is administered in Ontario by Keewaytinook Okimakanak.

The staff at Pic River Elementary was particularly impressed by Jesse Fiddler's historical project on the K-Net web site. The teachers want to work with community members in Pic River to do a similar project on their new website... "We have the tapes and other historical materials.  Now we need to do what you have already accomplished on the Internet.  It will be a valuable tool for the classroom as well as the community at large," said one of the participants.

Click  here to see some more pictures from the session.

There was a total of 58,146,015 hits occurring on six of the monitored K-Net servers over the month of March. The six servers generating this amount of traffic include myknet.org, knet.ca, webmail.knet.ca, hosting.knet.ca, highschool.knet.ca, and photos.knet.ca (just click on the server to see the traffic monitoring chart for each server).

This number shows an increase from the previous month of over 6 million hits. As well, there was a total of over 800,000 visits made during this period to these six servers (an increase of over 80,000 visits from the previous month). The following table shows the actual numbers for these categories for the month of March.

Personal web pages at MyKnet.org continue to be the most popular on-line space for the Nishnawbe Aski to browse. In March there were over 48 million hits on this K-Net server (over 4 million more hits from the previous month)! The average daily hits on this server rose to over 1.55 million hits each day on this server!

Most of the K-Net servers that are being monitored for hits, visits and usage statistics using the webalizer program again showed an increase during the month.

Please note:

• other on-line K-Net services, such as K-Net chat and the video streamer are not included in these numbers;
• server traffic monitoring information is located at http://tech.knet.ca/~tech/monitoring/webalizer

A video conference meeting of the twelve Smart Community Demonstration projects on the last day of the program, signalled the start of a new era of development for each of the initiatives began under this innovative Industry Canada program. The Kuhkenah Network of Smart First Nations project successfully completed all the proposed deliverables scaling many of them to include other First Nations and organizations across the region and the country.

The Keewaytinook Okimakanak First Nations are now undertaking the challenge of planning and developing strategies to sustain all the programs and services began under this project.

Kenjgewin Teg Educational Institute at M'Chigeeng (formerly West Bay First Nation) is hosting the last of an extensive series of Web Site Development workshops coordinated by the Ontario Regional Management Organization of Industry Canada's SchoolNet program. Click here to check out the pictures of this workshop.

Began back in the spring of 2003, Keewaytinook Okimakanak staff have now hosted more than 18 different training sessions to introduce the use of the open source content management program called Post Nuke to First Nation schools and students across the province. When Brian Walmark took on the challenge of coordinating these workshops back in October 2003, he used to say that he never thought of himself as a computer trainer. Today, he lead another workshop with a large group of educators from the First Nation schools on Manitoulin Island.

More than 80 First Nation education web sites have been started under this project. There is lots more work to do on each of these web sites but with this initial introduction and with these resources now available to this many schools, there is lots of opportunities for a widespread take up of these on-line tools in the new fiscal year. Click here to check out the First Nation school web sites.