Author: Matthew Johnson, Director of Education, MediaSmarts
Level: Kindergarten to Grade 2
Lesson Length: 20-30 minutes, plus time for optional assessment/evaluation and extension activities
Subject Area: English Language Arts, Visual Arts, Ethics and Religious Culture
Lesson Link: https://mediasmarts.ca/teacher-resources/break-fake-what’s-frame
We had an internet outage in our neighbourhood last week. We had no internet access for three whole days.
Parents could be forgiven for thinking that our children are born media literate. They are mediatized, certainly, even before they are born: it’s a rare baby shower that doesn’t feature Elsa or Elmo in one form or another. As for digital literacy, kids take to devices like the proverbial ducks to water, quickly becoming expert at finding the videos and games they want.
If you’re wondering how to get started making media on your phone, tablet or computer, animation is a great place to start. You can start doing it as a family activity even when kids are very young and they’ll soon be able to do almost everything themselves.
MediaSmarts is pleased to offer an online course for teachers on media making in K-12 classrooms. Educators can take this interactive, engaging and informative course from their home, on their own schedule. The course will be offered July 5-30, 2021. The registration fee is $50.00 for teachers and $25.00 for student teachers.
Making Media Across the Curriculum will provide teachers with training and resources on how to use digital media production of various kinds (games, film and animation, etc.) in their classroom practice.
For nearly thirty years, Canadian teachers have been at the forefront of getting students online and preparing them to use networked technologies safely, productively and responsibly. Many young Canadians have their first experiences with the internet in their classrooms and school libraries. Over the past decade, though, while digital tools have come to provide new opportunities for creating and distributing digital content, MediaSmarts’ research shows that most Canadian teachers aren’t making media in the classroom.
OTTAWA – MediaSmarts, Canada’s not-for-profit centre for digital literacy, has launched a new free, self-directed online course for in-service and pre-service teachers and other educators. Making Media Across the Curriculum will provide training and resources to incorporate digital media production such as games, film, and animation in their classrooms from kindergarten to Grade 12 and across the curriculum.
In this lesson, students examine two websites about unlikely animals and learn how to effectively evaluate online sources. They then create a fake website that demonstrates the misleading signals that are often mistakenly taken as signs of reliability.
We’ve been using video games to bond with our kids for a while now. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em, right?