MediaSmarts

Buy Nothing Day, Friday, November 23, is an annual event that is observed the day after American Thanksgiving, which is considered the busiest shopping day of the year and the start of the Christmas shopping season. The purpose of Buy Nothing Day is to make people think about the role of shopping, and more broadly consuming, in our culture. Check out MediaSmarts’ lesson on Buy Nothing Day (Grades 7-12), which uses the day as a jumping-off point to look at the role of consumerism in our lives and culture.

MediaSmarts is pleased to announce its latest research, The Digital Well-Being of Canadian Families which focuses on the strategies and challenges of digital parenting today.

The digital age presents us with unprecedented problems when it comes to finding information and making sure that it’s true. Where our first problem used to be getting information, what’s more difficult today is filtering out what we need from what we don’t.

Getting the Toothpaste Back into the Tube: A Lesson on Online Information (Grades 6-8) In this lesson, students watch a short video that compares getting rid of personal information online to getting toothpaste back into a tube. Through the video and a series of short scenarios, students learn the five principles of information online: that information online is permanent, can be copied, can be seen by unintended audiences, can be seen by larger audiences than intended, and that it becomes searchable.

The Digital and Media Literacy Outcomes section of our website shows how our resources meet curriculum outcomes for different subjects in each province and territory.

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