IP addresses (Internet Protocol Addresses) are specific addresses given to each device that accesses the Internet. This allows servers to send web information to the right computer. It works a bit like how postal addresses allow the postman to bring letters to the right house. Any device that accesses the Internet has a public address so that the content they request can correctly be sent to them.

An IP address looks like this: 198.51.100.12; 4 numbers separated by points. Each individual number can be from 0 to 255. IP addresses are usually grouped by “ranges” and whole ranges are assigned to specific organizations. Telling us which specific addresses and ranges are yours allows us to identify that a specific visit to our website comes from your network and allow us to assign traffic and film views to the right school, province, etc.

If your institution has an Education License to use our content in the classroom, giving us your IP addresses and ranges will allow us to create usage reports that correctly represent the requests on our websites that come from your institutions. It is not necessary to give us this info for the resource to work, but it is necessary to have usage statistics.

Make sure you share with us your public IP addresses. Your network will have both internal and public facing addresses – only the public ones make sense for creating our usage reports.

It is solely used to create these reports and analyse usage of our content in the form of aggregate data. No information can be linked back to a specific individual. Other than your own school, school board, institution, or Ministry or Department of Education, we never share this information with anyone.