Online peer intervention

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

First Do No Harm: How to be an active witness - Tip Sheet

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:

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.

10 Tiny Ways You Can Make the World a Better Place Today

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.

Witnessing cyberbullying: Teaching kids how to respond to make things better (not worse)

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. 

Online Relationships: Respect and Consent

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. Finally, students create an “explainer” video in which they illustrate one of the aspects of consent.

Helping our kids navigate our digital world - Parent guide

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.

Online Cultures and Values

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.

First, Do No Harm: Being an Active Witness to Cyberbullying

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.

From Ethics and Empathy to Making and Remixing: Extending Digital Literacy to the Secondary Grades

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.