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.
These posters are freely available to print and hang in your schools, in libraries, or community centres.
In this lesson, students consider the importance of the written and unwritten rules that make it possible to learn and play together, online and offline.
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.
Verbal or emotional abuse is the most prevalent form of bullying online. Social bullying, another pervasive form – particularly with girls – includes social exclusion and spreading gossip and rumours.
This lesson allows students to explore the concepts of rules, values and ethics and learn how they influence our decision-making. Students are then invited to consider how they can contribute to create positive online cultures.
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.
While the training workshops focus on the five key concepts of digital literacy, this implementation guide looks at the specific skill areas that MediaSmarts has identified as being essential for students to learn by the end of their secondary education: ethics and empathy, privacy and security, community engagement, digital health, consumer awareness, finding and verifying and making and remixing. The guide also addresses common challenges to integrating digital literacy into the classroom, such as limitations on available technology and classroom management concerns, and includes links to relevant MediaSmarts’ and other resources, and apps and tools for creating digital media in your classroom.
In this lesson, students learn about the concept of "time capsules" and then apply the idea by selecting time capsule contents to represent both the time they live in and their own lives and tastes. They then extend this idea to online content, making a "time capsule" of any online content connected to them. Younger students finish the lesson by creating a group Internet time capsule, while older students finish by considering what online content they might like to remove or keep out of their "time capsules."
This lesson introduces students to the online marketing techniques that are used to target children on the Internet. It begins with a guided discussion about the similarities and differences between traditional marketing methods and online advertising and why the Internet is such a desirable medium for advertisers to reach young people. Student activities include a survey of the marketing techniques used on several commercial websites for children; the creation of a commercial website for kids that incorporates common marketing strategies; and an analysis of case studies about online marketing to young people.