Online tool helping thousands of students, Indigenous community members learn Ojibwe – The Globe and Mail

Mike Parkhill remembers receiving a call from a community leader in a northern Ontario First Nation about three years ago asking if he had a tool that might help students learn Ojibwe.

Parkhill, who runs a company that creates programs to help revitalize Indigenous languages, didn’t have such a tool at the time but the idea to create one took root.

A year and a half later, Parkhill and his team began developing a digital program to help teach Ojibwe, eventually launching it in September 2022. Use of the tool has been growing – nearly 3,000 people, including 1,800 students largely from northern Ontario, are taking lessons from it – and the program could soon expand to hundreds of students in southern Ontario.

“It has all been grassroots, we haven’t promoted it,” said Parkhill, who is not Indigenous but has been working to develop ways to help Indigenous language preservation and revitalization efforts for years.

Read More: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-online-tool-helping-thousands-of-students-indigenous-community-members/