Nunavut students build a presence on the ‘Net

Natural Resources Canada is helping Nunavut students teach the world about Nunavut.

By NUNATSIAQ NEWS

SEAN McKIBBON

IQALUIT — Some students in Nunavut are helping to teach their peers in other parts of the world about the place they call home while learning important Internet and computer skills.

“There’s a lot of really wonderful positive things the students can share,” says Eric Kramers of Natural Resources Canada.

Kramers has been touring schools in Nunavut and introducing students to the Canadian Community Atlas project, which sees children from kindergarten to Grade 12 helping to build web sites that tell people about the places they live.

Students at schools in Pond Inlet, Pangnirtung, and now Joamie and Inuksuk schools in Iqaluit are building the sites and researching aspects of their communities. Kramers said applications to join the program have just been received from Arctic Bay.

“How many of you think other people might like to know something about where you live,” he asked a class of Grade 10 and 11 students at Inuksuk. Almost all of the students put up their hand.

“Sure they would. All sorts of people are interested in things about your community,” he told them.

There are all sorts of issues facing students and their communities in the north, Kramers said and the web sites can help other people understand them. Kramers cited such topics as DEW line site clean-ups, grocery prices, and employment as just some of the many topics the students could explore.

Using a web site template provided by the federal government, students can research everything from local media outlets, to the weather, to sounds of wildlife, to demographics and post it on the Internet.

The sites are to be hosted by servers at the local schools that build them, said Kramers, but they are all linked to a central Atlas Canada web site and a centralized database can help people who visit the site find anything the students post.

Data about their communities is available to the students from other government agencies such as Statistics Canada, Kramers said.

The project is an off-shoot of the Canadian National Atlas, which from 1902 until 1999 was always printed on paper. Last August, Kramers says, the Canadian Atlas went on-line.

“This is something for the students to do and create and at the same time learn important skills,” Kramers said.

A similar philosophy is driving a parallel Internet project at Inuksuk High School in Iqaluit, where an Industry Canada “Grass Roots” grant is helping to pay for the development of a web site than can showcase learning at the high school and possibly help provide curriculum at other schools, said Inuksuk high school’s vice principal, David Lloyd.

Teachers and students at the school are helping to build web sites that are integrated with classroom teaching. For instance if a science class dissects a caribou, they’ll post the results on a web site hosted by the Baffin District Education Authority’s server.

“We’re willing to create resources that can be used as teaching resources in other schools,” said Lloyd. The eventual aim is to have a web site that displays the education department’s curriculum and it’s philosophy of integrating traditional Inuit knowledge into the learning environment.

He said the exercise has a number of applications, including providing learning material for other students in other parts of Canada, as well as familiarizing students at Inuksuk with the Internet, bulletin boards and e-mail.

However, he said emphasis for the students remains on research and presentation skills.

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