

Don’t Drink and Drive: Assessing the Effectiveness of Anti-Drinking Campaigns - Lesson
In this lesson, students explore a variety of anti-drinking and alcohol awareness campaigns in order to determine their effectiveness. Students will deconstruct the different approaches that have been used by various organizations to reach teens and young adults and will debate those techniques that are most likely to resonate with youth. In a summative activity, groups of students create and implement an alcohol awareness campaign for students.

Kids, Alcohol and Advertising - Lesson 2: Young Drinkers
In this lesson, students learn why the alcohol industry needs replacement (new) drinkers and how it exploits the needs and desires of young people in order to foster brand loyalty.

Healthy Food Web
In this lesson, students consider the role of snack foods in a healthy diet. The teacher then guides them on a tour of popular sites aimed at children, where the class identifies and classifies the advertising encountered there and looks at how the food products being advertised fit – or don’t fit – in the food groups found in the Canada Food Guide. Students then play the game Co-Co’s AdverSmarts to understand some of the techniques used by online food marketers and then create their own mock website promoting a healthy diet.

Avatars and body image
In this lesson students are introduced to the concept of "avatars" and share their experiences creating and playing avatars in video games and virtual worlds. They then create avatars using a program that is intentionally limited in terms of available body types and gender markers, first creating an avatar of their own gender and then of the opposite gender, and then discuss the program and relate it to representations of gender and body image in games and virtual worlds and in other media. Students then create avatars using a much more flexible version of the program and compare that experience to the more limited version. Finally, students use the more versatile program to create avatars that represent how they see themselves and how they would like others to see them online and reflect on the choices that went into creating them.

Can You Spot the Ad?
In this lesson, students will learn about the concept of branded content and will learn to differentiate between branded images and videos and non-branded images and videos in online and offline contexts through a series of questions and discussions.