July 7, 2010 (Ottawa) – Canada's leading digital literacy organization, Media Awareness Network (MNet), is sounding the alarm that Canada will continue to trail other countries in productivity and innovation unless a national plan for digital literacy is put in place.
MediaSmarts is excited to offer two free virtual digital media literacy professional workshops for educators thanks to funding from the Ontario Ministry of Education. These two new professional development workshops were developed to support the updated Grade 1-9 Language Curriculum in Ontario.
MediaSmarts, Canada’s centre for digital and media literacy, has today launched an extensive new program to support teachers in integrating digital literacy into their classrooms. Use, Understand & Create: A Digital Literacy Framework for Canadian Schools (K-8) is a cross-curricular program that provides teachers with an array of tools to give students the skills they need for the digital age.
Outcome Chart - British Columbia - Digital Literacy 10-12
Ottawa, ON (May 25, 2016) – MediaSmarts, Canada’s centre for digital and media literacy, has today launched the final component to its extensive program to support teachers in integrating digital literacy into their classrooms.
September 20, 2023 – Our online environments present unique challenges: extremism, online hate and the spread of misinformation and AI-generated deepfakes, just to name a few. But studies have shown that it takes just 10 percent of the people in a community to set its values. Spreading positive content can have a real impact.
While the training workshops focus on the five key concepts of digital literacy, this implementation guide looks at the specific skill areas that MediaSmarts has identified as being essential for students to learn by the end of their secondary education: ethics and empathy, privacy and security, community engagement, digital health, consumer awareness, finding and verifying and making and remixing. The guide also addresses common challenges to integrating digital literacy into the classroom, such as limitations on available technology and classroom management concerns, and includes links to relevant MediaSmarts’ and other resources, and apps and tools for creating digital media in your classroom.
Parents, you may be aware that Media Literacy Week is October 24-28 and Digital Citizen Day is October 26, but we should talk about digital media literacy all year round. We are raising kids who are going to be so much better at using media for (hopefully) good; for their education, careers, community giving and passions. It’s moving quickly and we are trying to keep up.
Guest blog by Patricia Kosseim, Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario
To develop the Use, Understand & Create framework, we needed to first explore the digital literacy skills Canadian youth were already learning in different provinces and territories. Our discussion paper Mapping Digital Literacy Policy and Practice in the Canadian Landscape draws on policy and curriculum documents from across the country to synthesize key concepts and best practices in current digital literacy education. The discussion paper was made possible by financial contributions from Google Canada.