Give your kids the guidance they need.
MediaSmarts is pleased to announce that we have partnered with Instagram and Connect Safely to launch a Parents’ Guide to Instagram to help prepare you to give your kids the guidance they need.
The purpose of this workshop is to provide tweens and young teens with strategies and knowledge that will help them respect themselves, respect others and respect the space when using social media.
Co-Co’s AdverSmarts: An Interactive Unit on Food Marketing on the Web is an educational game for young children. The purpose of the game is to teach five- to eight-year-olds how to recognize commercial websites that target kids through highly engaging and interactive Web environments.
In this lesson, students learn to question media representations of gender, relationships and sexuality. After a brief “myth busting” quiz about relationships in the media and a reminder of the constructed nature of media products, the teacher leads the class in an analysis of the messages about gender, sex and relationships communicated by beer and alcohol ads. Students analyze the messages communicated by their favourite media types and then contrast it with their own experience.
If you haven’t seen the story of the Hot Dog Princess that has been making the rounds of the Internet, I suggest you read this Buzzfeed article. To summarize: it was “Princess Week” at five-year-old Ainsley’s dance class and she decided to wear a hot dog costume. As a parent, this is the kind of youthful impertinence I can get behind. After all, THIS was a princess who really knew who she was, a princess that was not like other princesses, a #hotdogprincess.
On the Loose: A Guide to Online Life for Post-Secondary Students supports young adults who are experiencing both new freedoms and challenges in their post- secondary life.
Talk Back! How to Take Action on Media Issues gives you the tools to talk back to media companies.
Did you know that almost a quarter of adults have shared a false news story, and that we’re least likely to fact-check news and other things that come to us through people we know and trust on social networks (even though for many people these are their most common sources of news)?
Building on MediaSmarts’ findings on youth and privacy from our Young Canadians in a Wired World research, our new qualitative study, To Share or Not to Share: How Teens Make Privacy Decisions about Photos on Social Media examines the reasoning that teens apply when sharing photos online.
Few issues capture our anxiety about young people and digital media so perfectly as sexting. As with technologies at least as far back as the telegraph, much of this anxiety has focused specifically on girls and women.