Digital Media Literacy Framework

Young Canadians need to be able to make good choices about privacy, ethics, safety and verifying information when they’re using digital media, and they need to be prepared to be active and engaged digital citizens. Based on our ground-breaking research on digital literacy education in Canada – and linked to existing curriculum outcomes for each province and territory – MediaSmarts’ model curriculum that provides a framework for integrating digital literacy in Canadian schools. The framework draws on our research to identify nine essential skill topics that students need to know and provides resources in each category and at every grade level.

Critically Engaging with Media Violence

While parents may find certain representations of violence wholly appropriate for young people, there’s a wide continuum of content that exists online and in the media. Anything from a cartoon cat having an anvil comically dropped on his head to video images of real-life injuries and deaths can be accessed online by children and youth.

Violence

Social Studies 1-8

The Ontario social sciences curriculum includes expectations that incorporate media education themes. The grade curriculum document Social Sciences and Humanities (2013) includes a section that demonstrates the complementary relationship between the critical thinking approach of media education and social sciences:

What do We Know About Media Violence?

It’s hard to clearly define the effect media violence has on consumers and young people. This is mainly because terms like “violence” and “aggression” are not easily defined or categorized. To a child, almost any kind of conflict, like the heated arguments of some talk-radio shows or primetime news pundits, can sound as aggressive as two cartoon characters dropping anvils on each other.

Violence

The Good Things About Television

Television is an inescapable part of modern culture. We depend on TV for entertainment, news, education, culture, weather, sports—and even music, since the advent of music videos.

Television

Masculinity and Sports Media

Sports media also contributes to the construction of masculinity in contemporary society.

Gender Representation, Sports, Stereotyping

How Marketers Target Kids

Advertising: It’s everywhere. No, it’s not your imagination. The amount of advertising and marketing we are exposed to daily has exploded: on average, we see more than four thousand ads each day.[1] At the gas pumps, in the movie theatre, in a washroom stall, on stickers on fruit, during sporting events and plastered all over social media—advertising is pretty much impossible to avoid.

Marketing & Consumerism

How can we judge health and science information?

Probably the most essential factor in accurately and objectively judging health and science information is to understand how science is done.

Authenticating Information

Women Working in the Media

Since the 1960s, feminists have argued that "it matters who makes it." When it comes to the mass media, "who makes it" continues to be men.

Gender Representation, Stereotyping