Image Gap - Lesson
This lesson helps students understand how self-image can influence lifestyle choices.
Mirror Image - Lesson
In this lesson, students analyze their own body image and consider what they wish they could change.
Truth or Money - Lesson
In this lesson, students explore how advertising leverage can lead to censorship of information about public health issues.
Gender and Tobacco - Lesson
In this lesson, students explore gender-related influences on smoking.
Selling Tobacco - Lesson
In this lesson, students explore how tobacco advertising has evolved over the past sixty years.
Thinking Like a Tobacco Company: Grades 7-9 - Lesson
In this lesson, students learn how the tobacco industry targets the needs, wishes and desires of young people in order to sell cigarettes.
Sexting: Shifting the Focus from Victim-Blaming to Respect and Consent
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.
Tobacco Labels
In this lesson, students debate the effectiveness of health warning labels on tobacco products.
Talking to your kids about pornography
It is natural for adolescents to be curious about sex: MediaSmarts’ research suggests that one in six grade 7- 11 students use the Internet to look for information about sexual health. Twenty percent of kids that age look for pornography online, but a third see it without looking for it — and close to half take steps to keep from seeing it.
Sexting and youth: Confronting a modern dilemma
It’s hard to think of a recent digital technology issue that’s captured the public imagination more than sexting. This may be because it combines elements of the classic moral panic with more modern “technopanic,” provoking worries not just about the morality of our children – and, in particular, young girls – but also about the possible effects of technology on how we grow, think and behave. As with most panics, of course, the issue is substantially more complicated and less sensational than we perceive it to be, and while it’s unlikely that our worries about sexting will ever seem in retrospect to be as absurd as our grandparents’ fears about crime comics, MediaSmarts’ new data shows that many of our beliefs and assumptions on the subject need closer examination.