K-12 Schools

Knowledge Ontario offers e-resources and online services both directly for home use and through public libraries, school boards, and post-secondary institutions. Four of these services are offered through school libraries:

Ask Ontario
Learn Ontario
Our Ontario
Resource Ontario

These services are delivered through province-wide portals and tools in English and French that are accessible to every student and parent and easy to use. Because of the economies of scale that result from partnership with public libraries and post-secondary institutions, these services are available at only a fraction of the cost that school boards would pay on their own for these trusted, reliable learning resources.

• KO services help prepare K-12 students for future success in a college or university environment and facilitate school/public library partnerships
• All curriculum links and expectations are outlined to fully support teachers to take an ICT approach for 21st century learning skills
• KO resources are user friendly, interactive and highly visual
• KO licensed research resources are also valuable to e-learners, including smaller and isolated communities, students and adult learners facing mobility and other access barriers who rely on these resources to work from home
• KO's suite of services align with Leadership in Technology recommendations outlined in What If: Technology in the 21st Century Classroom [PDF]
• KO’s eResources portal provides an online 24x7 online library for all Boards who currently do not provide remote access to resources
• KO’s eResources portal provides Geo-IP authentication, eliminating the need for logon/password management

Read more about Knowledge Ontario's digital offerings and how they're helping to engage K-12 students in a recent article featured in The Teaching Librarian, a magazine produced by the Ontario Library Association.

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KO Solutions

Ask Ontario

askON is the brand name for Ask Ontario's real-time chat research service. People use instant messaging to chat in real-time with expert library staff who can help find relevant and authoritative information, answer questions, deliver articles and improve the public’s online research skills. Since its launch in January 2008, askON has expanded to service into more than 60 Ontario communities.

• 35 + public library communities and 20 + post-secondary communities are participating in the delivery of virtual reference services to 30,000 to 35,000 library patrons in 2009-10; more than half of all service users in participating public libraries are K-12 students; Knowledge Ontario is seeking to grow a partnership in Pathways to Education communities to make the askON service available as a resource to mentors and tutors in that program.
• 600 + librarians are currently trained to offer askON real-time chat reference services around the province.
• 44 hours/week service in the public library sector (M-Th 1pm-8pm; Fr-Sun 1pm-5pm) including 29 hours per week in the French language; research help and assistance with school assignments forms a significant sub-set of askON services.
• 3 online support tools, askON staff portal, back chat channel and blog, allow service staff to share information, consult and deliver consistent service quality.
• 500 + transcripts are analyzed each year in order to improve service quality and to identify training needs and opportunities. Research demonstrates that more than 90% of participants found knowledge resources they would not have found on their own. Exit surveys show an 85% satisfaction rate of good to excellent.

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Learn Ontario

Learn Ontario provides Ontarians with a unique slate of digital learning tutorials designed to strengthen and develop digital literacy skills. Tutorials include support for OESS licensed K-12 software, and “web 2.0” and social media tool sets.

• Learn Ontario has created a provincial portal of short solution-focused tutorials and has completed plans to partner with Atomic Learning and OSAPAC to support effective integration and use of software that supports 21st century digital literacies (5000+ solution focused tutorials).
• All of the OESS software provided through OSAPAC is supported directly by seamlessly integrating with their website, through integration of Learn Ontario as a resource tab link for each title; All curriculum links and expectations are outlined to fully support teachers to take an ICT approach for 21st century learning skills.
• The portal is currently being adapted to support Geo-IP authentication, a process that will recognize any LearnOntario portal user coming from an internet connection within Ontario and grant them access to all licensed resources – no password needed. Logons and passwords and the support required to administer them create costs and barriers to entry, yet secure authentication must be provided for give access to paid/licensed resources.
• The portal is currently undergoing translation into French to meet the needs of Ontarians in both official languages, including French immersion students.
• In February 2010, Learn Ontario launched a prototype of its educational resources portal - LearnOntario.ca The full version including the expanded tutorial content from Atomic Learning will be available in the summer of 2010. It is available, without cost to users, 24/7 from school, home or workplace.
• In the initial six month pilot test of the LearnOntario.ca portal, 500 educators and their students from eight school boards used over 6000 of the technology tutorials; both in class (75% of use) and from home (25% of use). Exit surveys showed over 80% of users had found the technology support they needed and felt they had improved their effectiveness in using software applications.

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Our Ontario

Our Ontario provides both leading edge portal and toolkit technologies that enable anytime, anywhere discovery of tens of thousands of digital items of local history and culture about Ontario. It is an unmatched resource for searching and finding primary research sources for use in a wide array of school projects.

• 110 + digital toolkit partners and 260 + groups and institutions are currently contributing content to the OurOntario.ca portal.
• Our Ontario’s toolkit and portal technologies both simplifies the process and greatly reduce the cost to participating organizations of planning, digitizing, hosting and providing access to their digital collections. Barely 1% of Canada’s culture and heritage content in currently available in digital form. Through Our Ontario, a growing collection of primary resources are available to students and researchers – four million pages and counting.
• Over 25,000 government documents from the Legislative Library of Ontario are searchable. These are unmatched primary resources for use in teaching, research and K-12 student projects.
• In the last two years, there have been more than 6.8 million visits to the portal and hosted sites of toolkit partners. Over the same period, there have been more than 20 million page views on the portal and hosted sites; 350 + people trained on use of the toolkits in the last year alone.
• A recent Teaching Librarian article outlines how KO resources support the Ontario curriculum. It gives specific project examples of projects, one a lesson plan on bottled water using Canadian Points of View to help students work through an argument, and a second lesson using KO primary sources related to the War of 1812.

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Resource Ontario

Resource Ontario’s current suite of 44 online databases provides 24/7 access to more than 150 million authoritative, trusted, and age appropriate e-resources. These include the vast majority of Canadian newspapers and popular magazines, French language current affairs resources, student reference centre (Canadian edition), teen health and wellness, access to thousands of journals and periodicals, French language current affairs resources and much more. They provide a core suite of digital learning resources to every library, learning institution, student and adult learner in Ontario.

Knowledge Ontario currently renews database licenses for sequential two year terms. All library sectors, including school boards are consulted through a sector survey (n=45-50) on priority acquisitions as part of each cycle. Collectively, these databases provide Ontarians with free, open and reliable access to essential information and learning resources through their public, school and academic libraries. The current licensing is in place for all databases until December 2010.

• 31 - 33 million searches have been performed against the various databases in each of the last two years. K-12 schools accounted for nearly 60% of total searches and nearly one in five full-text downloaded documents. Through the combined efforts of KO and the licensed content providers, the proportion of school boards registered and using the databases has increased to 85 per cent.
• Excellent resources for professional development – teachers have made 190 thousand uses of Educators' Reference Complete, the premiere source for professional development reading, focused on educational principles, child development & psychology, ICT, latest technologies and best practices in education.
• KO has been actively involved in identifying needed improvements to the search interfaces of the licensed databases. New web-like portal interfaces are nearing completion, and the first wave are being launched over the next three months. Student Reference Centre (Canadian Edition) will be launched in time for September.
• The majority of public libraries, school boards and colleges secure access to millions of online electronic resources they could never have licensed on their own, and at a fraction of the cost of licensing them through small consortia and individual institutions. The projected savings province-wide across all 72 school boards by the end of 2010 is at least $8 million.
• The licensed e-resources provided through Knowledge Ontario would be prohibitively expensive to purchase at a school site license level, with costs exceeding $13 million even when limited to secondary school sites. It must be remembered that as the resources broaden their interactive, multimedia content and take on a more web like visual look, their value and ease of use by students in grades 5 through 8 will greatly increase as well.

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KO eResources and student research skills

Anita Brooks Kirkland Library Consultant in Information Technology Services at Waterloo Region District School Board has created this Powerpoint presentation connecting the dots between how Knowledge Ontario eResources support students in the process of doing research assignments. It is narrated and Anita has given permission for the Powerpoint to be used freely, with acknowledgement. Link to it on your own site or embed the video directly.

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