Family TV Time

Sometimes I wonder if watching TV is going the way of the dodo. Remember when we were kids, and there was concern about how watching TV was going to turn all of us into mindless zombies?

Where's The Line? Online Safety Lesson Plan for School Resource Officers

This lesson was produced with the support of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).

Objectives:

• To further online safety education.
• To promote safe and responsible online behaviour through:
  • Encouraging youth to make safe and ethical decisions online;
  • Helping youth to identify strategies and supports that are available to assist them with issues they may encounter online.

Editing Emotions

In this lesson, students learn about the history of film editing and how shot composition, juxtaposition of images and the use of rhythm and repetition in film editing can affect the emotional impact of a film. Students begin by watching a video on the basics of film editing and answering questions to aid their comprehension. They then view and analyze a slideshow demonstrating basic ways in which the "building blocks" of film editing can affect a film's emotional impact, and discuss how this can affect a film's rating. Finally, students create their own film and/or storyboard, using the editing techniques they've learned to produce different emotional effects with the same collection of shots.

Film Classification Systems in Québec

In this lesson students learn about the systems used to classify films, TV programs and video games. Students are asked to take a critical look at the criteria applied to classify these media products, and then take into account and discuss the underlying social and political aspects arising from those systems.

Getting the Rules Right

When screens started being part of our daily lives – not just for work, but for entertainment, communication, and news – we parents had to do some serious thinking. What would the rules be? How would we govern these new devices? What were the best choices?

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.

Help! Someone shared a photo of me without my consent! – Tip Sheet

1. You can start by asking the person who shared it to take it down or stop sharing it. Kids report that this works more often than not!
2. Ask the service or platform where it was shared to take it down. If you’re under 18, they may be required by law to take it down, and most also have a policy of taking down any photos that were shared without the subject’s permission.
   Cell Phones and Texting, Cyberbullying, Digital Citizenship, Gender Representation, Sexting, Sexual Exploitation, Social Networking

Moral disengagement

Moral disengagement is used to describe the ways in which we convince ourselves to do something that we know is wrong, or to not do something we know is right. MediaSmarts’ research looked at the impact of four moral disengagement mechanisms:

Social norms, peer pressure and reciprocity

How common young people think sexting is has been identified as one of the strongest factors influencing whether they send sexts.

The Spotify Problem

We have a few smartphone rules in our house: no phones after 9:30 p.m., no phones at the dinner table or other family events, and no phones in bedrooms.