Connected North 2021 Highlights

Connected North provides live, interactive virtual learning sessions and access to educational resources for students and teachers in remote communities, supporting them wherever they learn. Through the program, tens of thousands of Indigenous students from Kindergarten — Grade 12 are offered unique opportunities to thrive.

Awards & Recognition

This year, Connected North was recognized out of more than 2,600 candidates as one of the top 100 education innovations in the world by HundrED. Connected North also received the 2021 inaugural “Making a Difference, True Champion and Advocate Award” from the Centre for Interactive Learning and Collaboration (CILC).

Record-breaking Demand

So far during the 2021–2022 school year, we have delivered 2,255 Connected North sessions to the 118 Active Schools in the network. This is a 77% increase in sessions from this same period last year. There are over 1,000 sessions available to be booked, delivered by more than 300 unique content providers.

Our Generous Supporters

Thank you to the team, community partners, content providers, teachers, administrators, donors and most importantly, to the students who we are honoured to serve, for making Connected North possible. Several are recognized below this video from our community:

With support from Cisco, our ability to respond uniquely was enhanced during the pandemic with Connected North @ Home sessions during rolling school closures.

With support from RBC Foundation, we have been able to expand our menu to include over 100 First Nations, Inuit and Métis experts across a range of fields and areas of expertise.

With support from Scotiabank, we have launched a mobile app and built our digital platform to support teachers in browsing and making session requests according to their classroom needs.

With support from CIBC we were able to strengthen our content related to Science, Technology and Math sessions.

Thanks to Amazon’s generosity, we have been able to offer coding workshops to educators and students, and ship and supply educational resources that have supported hundreds of Connected North sessions.

With support from Samuel Family Foundation, Barry & Laurie Green, Webster Family Foundation, The Graham Burton Foundation, the Government of Nunavut, Canada Life, New Gold, Top Hat, Blakes, Lenovo, Intel, CIRA, McConnell Foundation, Jabra, Athabasca Basin Development, Paliare Roland Rosenberg Rothstein LLP, and many private individuals, we have been able to offer tailored support to various regional partners and clusters.

Digital Inclusion Grants

This year, with support from the Government of Canada’s Supports for Student Learning Program, we awarded more than 500 laptops and tablets to those in need across our partner communities. In the coming months, a new round of these grants will grow to support more than 1,000 Grade 11 and 12 students on track to graduate.

We have launched a Connected North Student Participation Award with a laptop from Lenovo as a gift for schools to award to a selected student. 100 laptops were donated by Lenovo as part of this initiative!

Ready for 2022

As our team reflects on the year ahead, we remain hopeful about the growing possibilities to enrich classroom experiences with dynamic learning moments. Thank you to our friends, partners & supporters for bringing this work to life!