Stay on the Path Lesson One: Searching for Treasure
In this lesson students learn how to create well-defined search strings and to use tools and techniques such as bookmarking, browser filters and search engine preferences to avoid unwanted material.
Character Day
September 22 is Character Day, an international day that fosters a conversation around developing character strengths (resilience, grit, empathy, courage, kindness) – all rooted in evidence-based research. We’d like to share some resources that can help youth think about, and develop, their character.
Behaving Ethically Online: Ethics and Values
In this lesson, students consider how we come to hold values and how they affect our behaviour, especially online. They begin by comparing their assumptions about how common positive and negative online behaviours are with accurate statistics, and then consider how believing that something is more or less common than it really is can affect whether or not we think it’s acceptable. The teacher then uses a fable to introduce students to the ways that values can be communicated both overtly and implicitly and students discuss the ways in which their values have been communicated to them. They then turn specifically to the online context and consider what values they have learned about online behaviour and how they learned them. Finally, students consider scenarios that examine ethical questions online and role-play ways of resolving them.
Stay on the Path Lesson Two: All That Glitters is Not Gold
In this lesson students learn how to authenticate online information by comparing “facts” from the website www.allaboutexplorers.com with more authoritative sources.
From Ethics and Empathy to Making and Remixing: Extending Digital Literacy to the Secondary Grades
For more than a decade, MediaSmarts has been a leader in defining digital literacy in Canada. This is reflected in the elementary digital literacy framework we launched in 2015. The Use, Understand & Create framework is based on a holistic approach which recognizes that the different skills that make up digital literacy cannot be fully separated.