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Television - Special Issues for Young Children
Parents of young children need to actively manage and control TV viewing in the home. Children need a variety of activities for healthy development and television can be a fun and educational part of a child's daily routine, if managed properly.
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Television - Special Issues for Teens
Television viewing generally drops during adolescence as young people start to spend more time socializing, doing schoolwork, and using other media, such as music, video games, computers and the Internet.
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Television - Overview
Most of us have happy memories of watching television with our families when we were young. But what was once a simple shared pastime has become an increasingly complex—and sometimes problematic part of modern family life.
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The Family Group Chat
Recently, my youngest got a new phone that has data and the ability to text anyone. We’ve been texting with my eldest for some time now too. But after years of communicating this way, it finally happened: We, the parents, were invited into a family group chat.
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Wacky Media Songs: Reading Media
This lesson series contains discussion topics and extension activities for teachers to integrate the TVOKids Original series Wacky Media Songs. This lesson focuses on how media are made, how different media and genres tell stories and communicate meaning, and the affordances and defaults of different networked media.
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The Constructed World of Media Families
In this lesson, students identify the differences between TV families and real families by analyzing the conventions used by TV shows; and by comparing the problems and actions of television families to real world families.
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Miscast and Seldom Seen - Lesson
In this lesson students consider how well their favourite TV shows, movies and video games reflect the diversity of Canadian society.
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Just a joke? Helping youth respond to casual prejudice
One of the barriers to youth pushing back against prejudice is not wanting to over-react, particularly if they feel their peers were just ‘joking around.’ Humour, however, can often be a cover for intentional bullying and prejudice. In this lesson, students analyze media representations of relational aggression, such as sarcasm and put-down humour, then consider the ways in which digital communication may make it harder to recognize irony or satire and easier to hurt someone’s feelings without knowing it. Students then consider how humour may be used to excuse prejudice and discuss ways of responding to it.