Students in the junior grades lack sufficient critical thinking skills to surf the Web alone, but MediaSmarts’ Young Canadians in a Wireless World research shows that almost a third never or rarely use the Internet with an adult nearby. This is also an age where kids may be easily influenced by media images and personalities – especially those that appear "cool" or desirable.
Given their increasing use of the Internet to find information, now is also a good time to introduce strategies for determining authorship and authority of online information so they can recognize good health information, biased or hateful content, and online scams and hoaxes.
At this age media influences on gender norms and body image are becoming more intense. Children need to learn to apply key media literacy concepts to online spaces such as social networks.
MediaSmarts, Canada’s centre for digital media literacy and a registered charity, is excited to announce that the bilingual Teen Fact-Checking Network (TFCN) program - Réseau vérif ado in Canada will be continuing into 2026/2027! This international program was started in 2018 by MediaWise, a nonpartisan, nonprofit initiative of the Poynter Institute in the U.S., and has since expanded to Brazil, Germany, India, Spain, and Bulgaria.
In this lesson, students learn to recognize how the advertising genre is used to build brand loyalty for "parity products"—products like alcohol where there is little difference in taste or performance. Students learn to deconstruct the "Three Ps" of branding: Personality (the product's "vibe"), Position (the target audience), and Promise (the fantasy sold to the consumer). The lesson culminates in an "Ad Satire" assessment where students create a parody ad that "unmasks the brand" by flipping a glamorized media promise into a realistic social or medical consequence.