Post-quarantine rules reset
There are still a lot of unknowns about COVID-19, but for now at least, our province has started to open up a bit. Parks and beaches are open, most stores and malls are opening, and we’re even able to get haircuts again.
There are still a lot of unknowns about COVID-19, but for now at least, our province has started to open up a bit. Parks and beaches are open, most stores and malls are opening, and we’re even able to get haircuts again.
Our older teens, aged 17 and 15, have smartphones. They aren’t big users of social media, but they do get messages from friends fairly often on Instagram, Hangouts and Discord.
We had an internet outage in our neighbourhood last week. We had no internet access for three whole days.
This year, Canada’s 15th annual Media Literacy Week runs from October 26th to 30th. Co-hosted by MediaSmarts, Canada’s Centre for Digital and Media Literacy, and the Canadian Teachers’ Federation (CTF/FCE), the annual event invites all Canadians - teachers, students of all ages kindergarten to seniors and community groups, libraries, museums, to celebrate by engaging in media and digital literacy activities.
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. Upon completion of the course, participants will be certified by MediaSmarts as Media Maker Experts.
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?
This past December, my two daughters and I fell down the BTS rabbit hole.
BTS is a Korean K-Pop band that has been slowly taking over the universe since 2013. Their music can be heard worldwide, and in recent years they’ve made appearances on American late-night talk shows and on the American charts, while selling millions of records internationally.
An interesting thing happened the other day. My husband was talking about some recent political events in the United States, and my kids and I didn’t know what he was talking about.