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.
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.
In today's day and age, social media is everywhere. If you own a smartphone or computer of any sort, odds are you have at least one social media account and checking it is a part of your everyday routine. In high school, you’re constantly surrounded by social media! Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, high school life nowadays revolves around these three entities. It’s a great way to connect with friends, make plans, help spread information if you’re in a school club or sport, and it can even help you meet new people. Although there are many great things social media can offer, there can be a couple downsides too.
One of the biggest changes in our understanding of bullying over the past few years has been our increased awareness of the important role that witnesses, or bystanders, play in any bullying situation. Research on offline bullying has shown that witnesses can be just as important as targets or perpetrators in determining how a bullying scenario plays out. This is especially relevant in the case of electronic bullying, where witnesses have many more choices in how they might engage: they can choose to be invisible, to join in anonymously, to re-victimize someone by forwarding bullying material – or they can choose to intervene, to offer support to the person being targeted and to bear witness to what they have seen
Did you know? Two-thirds of Canadian students have helped someone who was being picked on online.
When you see or hear bad things happening online, you have a lot of power to make things better – or worse. Sometimes it’s hard to know the right thing to do, so ask yourself these questions:
Today is Pink Shirt Day, a national initiative to end bullying both offline and online. Since 2007, Canadians have been donning pink shirts to show their commitment to ending bullying in all forms.
The four of us watched the Oscars last night. My youngest went to bed before it ended so the rest of us are feeling rather bleary this morning. I always wonder why they always do it on a Sunday. Don’t they know it’s a school night? Sigh.
Parenting is a tough gig. We know it’s going to be hard going into it, but no one really explains how it’s going to all work when we finally get there.
Give your kids the guidance they need.
MediaSmarts is pleased to announce that we have partnered with Instagram and Connect Safely to launch a Parents’ Guide to Instagram to help prepare you to give your kids the guidance they need.
MediaSmarts has partnered with TELUS to develop resources for two online portals designed to help keep Canadian families and kids safe online; the TELUS WISE online educational program and the TELUS WISE footprint website.
This lesson asks students, in groups, to take their issue and solution to the streets. In order to enact real change through action for the benefit of the larger community, each chosen topic will need to be exposed to and understood by other members of the community. In this lesson, students will design a community outreach promotional campaign in order to effect real change that matters to them. If the students have completed the Digital Storytelling for Community Engagement lesson and have created their own Digital Story, this digital project can be used as the starting point/product with which to share with others. If not, groups of students can create a hypothetical solution to an existing problem, which then could be disseminated to the larger community using their designed outreach strategy.