Resources for Teachers - Online Ethics

Where's The Line? Online Safety Lesson Plan for School Resource Officers

This lesson was produced with the support of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

Objectives:

  • To further online safety education.
  • To promote safe and responsible online behaviour through:
    • Encouraging youth to make safe and ethical decisions online;
    • Helping youth to identify strategies and supports that are available to assist them with issues they may encounter online.

Think Before You Share

We always hear that sharing is a good thing. And thanks to technology, we can share our ideas, opinions, pictures and videos with our friends and other people we choose to share it with. Most of the time, sharing is good. But if we aren’t thoughtful about how we share, we run the risk of hurting ourselves or someone else. Also, remember that the things you share with your friends can end up being shared with others. That’s why it’s important to think before you share.

Your Connected Life: A Teen’s Guide to Life Online

The Your Connected Life guide is designed to help students who are just entering high school balance the demands of their offline life with their digital one.

Introduction to Cyberbullying: Avatars and Identity - Lesson

Because of the ways that digital media leave out many of the cues that prompt us to feel empathy, it is easy for young people to sometimes forget that real people – with real feelings – are at the heart of online conversations. In this lesson, students are provided with opportunities to explore this concept and discuss the importance of using empathy and common sense when talking to others online. 

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.