A Day in the Life of the Jos is a comprehensive digital citizenship tutorial that prepares students in grades six to eight to deal with all of the issues they face when using digital technology – from online privacy, to cyberbullying, to recognizing what’s real and what’s fake online.
Two years into the COVID-19 pandemic, it is more clear than ever that dealing with the misinformation surrounding COVID-19 requires us to come at it from every possible angle. We have needed trusted voices to provide strong, clear and sharable counter-messaging on social media.
Studies have shown that communicating the scientific consensus on a topic can be a helpful strategy in the fight against misinformation. For example, a 2015 study found that “emphasizing the medical consensus about (childhood) vaccine safety is likely to be an effective pro-vaccine message.”
Parenting is a tough gig. We know it’s going to be hard going into it, but no one really explains how it’s going to all work when we finally get there.
How can teachers equip their students to successfully and ethically navigate the digital world?
Remember the house hippo? The beloved mini creature who lived in Canadian homes? Or at least, that’s what we were told years ago as part of a Concerned Children's Advertisers campaign to help kids think critically about what they were seeing on TV.
Cyberbullying tweets from the President of the United States. Sexism in Silicon Valley. Fake news from social media feeds fuelling online hate.
It’s been a rough year so far on the digital media landscape.
For parents of teens and tweens, the Internet can sometimes seem like nothing more than an ever-expanding list of websites to keep up on: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat and so on, with new ones appearing every few months. While the safety risks associated with these mainstream sites are often exaggerated – and it’s more effective to build broader critical thinking skills than to focus on the particulars of kids’ latest favourite sites – there are some websites that present very real and specific risks and that parents are much less likely to know about. These are the so-called “rogue websites” that offer unapproved access to copyrighted content such as music, movies and video games.
Over the last week our world has been invaded: cute cartoon creatures can now be found lurking in parks, restaurants, museums, and even people's houses. If you haven't seen them, it's because they're only visible on a smartphone screen, and only if you're playing the new game "Pokémon Go".
If you are over twenty years old, you may not be aware of the show My Life as Liz, which is part of MTV's lineup that includes Jersey Shore and The Hills and recently began airing on MTV Canada. My Life as Liz stands out from those others shows for two reasons.