10 tiny ways you can make the world a better place today
You can make the world a better place TODAY. 10 tiny ways you can make the world a better place today.

You can make the world a better place TODAY. 10 tiny ways you can make the world a better place today.

In this lesson, students use mind maps to explore concepts of “respect” and “consent” in an online context. They consider a wide range of scenarios that shed light on different aspects of consent relating to digital media and draw on those to create a detailed definition. They then learn about the moral disengagement techniques or “sneaky excuses” that we sometimes use to let us do things we know are wrong, and identify them in short videos. Finally, students create a digital story in which they illustrate one of the aspects of consent or one of the “sneaky excuses.”

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.

In this lesson, students are introduced to basic concepts of anthropology and ethnography and explore how they apply to online communities. After performing a digital ethnography project on the norms and values of an online community, students consider how a community’s norms and values are formed and how they can be shaped and influenced.

In this lesson, students consider how difficult and complicated it can sometimes be to do the right thing. Students are asked to consider whether they agree with a number of widely-held moral principles and then are asked to consider a moral dilemma in which a number of moral principles are in conflict, reflecting on how their view of it may change based on the details of the scenario. They then explore the idea of weighing different moral principles against one another and develop their own moral dilemmas. Finally, students learn practical tools for deciding how best to intervene when they witness cyberbullying and apply those tools to moral dilemmas relating to cyberbullying.

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.

A Day in the Life of the Jos is a comprehensive digital citizenship tutorial that prepares students in grades six to eight to deal with all of the issues they face when using digital technology – from online privacy, to cyberbullying, to recognizing what’s real and what’s fake online.