Introduction to CLEONet

Fiona MacCool, CLEONet Project Manager

www.cleonet.ca

Presentation for Metropolitan Action Committee on

Violence Against Women and Children (METRAC)Fall 2009 Legal Information Training for Service Providers

December 2, 2009

About CLEO Established over 25 years ago, CLEO (Community

Legal Education Ontario / Éducation juridique communautaire Ontario) is a community legal clinic dedicated to providing low-income and disadvantaged people in Ontario with the legal information they need to understand and exercise their legal rights.

About CLEO’s Work In collaboration with legal clinics and other

community organizations across Ontario, CLEO identifies legal information needs, develops materials about the law, and through special projects (like CLEONet), supports the capacity of community organizations to meet their communities’ diverse needs for legal information and education.

About CLEO Publications• CLEO produces public legal education materials that

cover many areas of law, including social assistance, tenants’ rights, refugee and immigration law, workers’ rights, family law, consumer rights, and youth justice.

• Close to 4,000 community organizations from across Ontario order our publications each year. Every year we distribute well over a million print copies of our publications and over a million are downloaded from our web site.  

Current CLEO Projects• CLEONet - CLEONet is an online collection of legal information resources, news and events from community organizations

and legal clinics. The site is intended to help community workers and advocates working with low-income and disadvantaged communities help their clients understand and exercise their legal rights.

• Facilitator's Guide Workshops - A CLEO coordinator is available to support workshops using our new publication, “Facilitator's Guide: Introducing front line workers to CLEO's legal rights handbook”. The purpose of the Guide and workshop is to enable your agency staff to gain a greater familiarity with CLEO's Legal Rights Handbook, Do you know a woman who is being abused?

• Family Law Education for Women - CLEO participates in a consortium of community organizations called Family Law Education for Women (FLEW). The purpose of FLEW is to increase women's knowledge of their rights under Canadian and Ontario family law. FLEW has produced plain language legal information in many languages and in multiple formats on women’s rights under Ontario family law.

• Gladue - In partnership with the Ontario Federation of Indian Friendship Centres and Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto, CLEO is developing materials on Gladue to inform Aboriginals who appear in court that their heritage must be taken into account during sentencing.

• Six Languages Text and Audio Project - CLEO has developed legal information in text and audio format on six high need topics in Chinese, Arabic, Tamil, Urdu, Spanish and Somali.

• English as a Second Language Project - CLEO has developed materials at a range of levels to teach newcomers to Ontario in Adult ESL and LINC classes about their legal rights and responsibilities as they develop their language skills.

What is CLEONet?• CLEONet is a web site of legal information for

people in Ontario.• CLEONet is designed for community workers

and advocates who work with low-income and disadvantaged communities.

• CLEONet offers the sector one place to go to find the latest news and legal information on a wide range of topics, produced by hundreds of community organizations and legal clinics across Ontario.

CLEONet is designed to help you:• increase your knowledge of the law • develop legal information materials and workshops• find out about law reform campaigns, key changes in

the law, and community events• make more appropriate referrals• share your materials and promote your events and

campaigns• connect with other advocates working to increase

access to justice in Ontario

CLEONet Home Page

CLEONet Resources Page

Find information by Legal Topic

Information about each Resource

Information about Producing Organizations

RSS feeds by topic and subtopic

News by legal topic

Get Involved• Suggest content for CLEONet• Add CLEONet content to your site• Get CLEONet resources and news by e-mail• Learn about our legal education webinars• Follow us on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn

Get CLEONet content on your site• You can feature automatically updated listings

or feeds of CLEONet's resources, news, and events on your web site.

• These feeds, available in RSS or HTML (JavaScript), can be inserted anywhere on your web site in minutes and will conform to your site's "look and feel". You don't need any special software and there's no cost.

How feeds look on other sites

CLEONet Legal Information Webinars CLEONet is partnering with community

organizations to deliver workshops about legal issues online. They are delivered through a telephone conference call integrated with a web meeting that lets participants hear the presentation, look at Power Point slides, browse web sites together, and ask questions using live chat. We also record these webinars so that they can be accessed on CLEONet on an ongoing basis. See: www.cleonet.ca/legal_education_webinars

What you need to participateAs a presenter• A presentation that you

have developed that you would like to adapt to a webinar

• Presentation slides (Power Point) that can be inserted into web meeting so that participants can have visuals

• An audience to invite • A willingness to test,

experiment and learn as you go

As a participant• A phone (toll free number is

provided) • An Internet-connected

computer with a sound card and speakers and/or headphones

• An e-mail account to receive invitations and log in instructions

Webinar Features• Sharing Power Point slides• Live Chat• Integrated Telephone conference call• Letting users “see” your desktop• Granting control of your desktop• Great tool for online meetings/training or interactive

Q&A • Low-cost tool for producing video-based information in

other languages • Can be produced as a Podcasts, Uploaded to YouTube,

or embedded in social networking sites

Participant View

Co-presenter View

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Keep in touch!Fiona MacCool

Community Legal Education OntarioT: 416-408-4420 ext. 29

E-mail: fionamaccool@cleonet.caWeb site: http://www.cleonet.ca