Wewoka Public Schools has implemented new initiatives since the COVID pandemic to meet the needs of students and teachers in the district. Technological advancements within the district include providing one device per student for grades K-12. This is an upgrade from the one device per student for just grades 9-12 previously. The district will soon expand to two Chromebook devices per student in grades 1-8. Students in those grades will have both take-home devices and classroom devices. The new changes will also increase device lifespan and eliminate issues in the classroom by increasing the availability of devices.

Other exciting news from the school district includes the selection of 30 Wewoka teachers to receive grants from the Oklahoma State Department of Education that will help improve student instruction, behavior, skills and mental health. This provides new resources for the district and aids in positive student development for the future.

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A great deal of Indian Country often lacks internet access, and often, connectivity solutions fall on the shoulders of Tribal community members.

For the past two years, Tribal Broadband Bootcamps (TBB), co-founded by Matt Rantanen and Christopher Mitchell and now hosted at the Indigenous Connectivity Institute at Connect Humanity, have worked with 35 Tribes and more than 200 participants to date. I’ve been fortunate enough to connect and learn from this group that supports experiential opportunities for Tribal members to build, maintain, and troubleshoot nontraditional networks and wireless networks in Indian Country.

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ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) is a high-performance network backbone built to support scientific research. Funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and part of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, ESnet provides fast, reliable connections between national laboratories, supercomputing facilities, and scientific instruments around the globe. Our mission is to allow scientists to collaborate and perform research without worrying about distance or location.

In order to achieve that mission, we need to make sure our network is running as smoothly as possible. A key piece of this is collecting a wide range of telemetry about our network. Since science is an end-to-end process that crosses many networks, we also participate in multiple external collaborations, such as NetSage and perfSONAR, to make sure other networks have the tools they need to perform this collection as well.

Grafana plays an important role in visualizing and understanding the data we collect both internally and as part of our collaborative efforts. Specifically, we use Grafana as the visualization component within our Stardust Environment. Stardust measures network activity and usage giving us a window into network traffic, scientific data transfer activity, and more. This allows us to do things like predict capacity needs and easily view traffic surges on our infrastructure. While Grafana includes a lot of pre-built panel plugins that are great for visualization, it is also an extensible architecture that allows us to create custom visualizations tailored to our network analytic use cases.

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