One of the best and, depending on how you look at it, one of the worst things about our smartphones is that we now have a camera in our pocket.
It means that every moment has the potential to turn into a captured memory. But it also means that every moment may become a captured memory. See the issue?
Overall Expectations
Students will be expected to respect the contribution to the arts of individuals and cultural groups in local and global contexts, and value the arts as a record of human experience and expression.
Specific Expectations
By the end of grade 5, students will be expected to
5.4.1 use their knowledge and experience to respect and value the contributions of cultural groups in Canada
Overall Expectations
GCO 4: Students will be expected to respect the contributions to the arts of individuals and cultural groups in local and global contexts, and value the arts as a record of human experience and expression.
Specific Expectations
By the end of grade 6, students will be expected to:
Overall Expectations
By the end of Grade 6, students will:
assess human impacts on biodiversity, and identify ways of preserving biodiversity;
demonstrate an understanding of biodiversity, its contributions to the stability of natural systems, and its benefits to humans.
Specific Expectations
By the end of Grade 6, students will:
This chart contains media-related learning outcomes from Ontario, Curriculum for Economics CIE3M: The Individual and the Economy, with links to supporting resources on the MediaSmarts site.
In this lesson, students explore AI chatbots and their impact on human relationships. They compare chatbots to friends and learn how large language models function through pattern recognition rather than traditional programming. Through a “red-teaming” exercise, students identify risks such as privacy concerns and misinformation. Finally, they complete a “Build-a-bot” activity, designing safe, ethical prompts by defining roles, purposes, and guardrails. This teaches students to interact with AI critically and responsibly while understanding its limitations.
In this lesson, students in grades 4 through 6 explore the capabilities and limitations of AI. They learn to verify AI-generated answers using search engines and reliable sources while collaborating to build a model that explains how AI tools actually function. They evaluate the ethics of various AI uses and establish a set of responsible rules for its application in their studies. Finally, students design a visual "Learning Loop" that illustrates the distinct roles of humans and AI, reinforcing the concept that the student must remain the "boss" of the machine.
In this lesson, students learn how to manage distraction when using digital media tools and practice avoiding the “phone loop.” Students learn about the “phone loop” and simple strategies for avoiding it from a video, then rank those strategies based on how useful they think they will be in their own lives. They then think of different things they do with their phones, sort those into ones that have an obvious end point (like checking the weather) and those that don’t. Students try a number of different exercises designed to help them use their devices more mindfully, then write a reflection on the activity. They then identify ways in which apps’ and devices’ design features may make it easy to lose track of how much time we spend using them, then brainstorm ways they can change those features or their own habits to promote more mindful use. Finally, students design “paper prototypes” that show how they would change an app to encourage better habits and more mindful use.
