Buy Nothing Day

In this lesson Buy Nothing Day is used as a jumping-off point to look at the role of consumerism in our lives and culture.

How to Train Your Algorithm

You can train the algorithms on social networks and video sites to show you more of what you want, and less of what you don’t want. Here are some tips:

10 Tiny Ways You Can Make the World a Better Place Today

Today is Pink Shirt Day, a national initiative to end bullying both offline and online. Since 2007, Canadians have been donning pink shirts to show their commitment to ending bullying in all forms.

Making Comics

In this lesson, students learn how the comics medium works and try their hand at making simple comics.

Outcome Chart – Nunavut - ELA 1

Strand: Uqausiliriniq

Overall Expectations:

1. listen, speak, read, write, view and represent to access and explore prior knowledge and experiences of self and others.

Specific Expectations:

1.1.1 Talk about and/or represent self, and listen to others, and demonstrate curiosity

1.1.2 Express and explain text preferences (oral, print, and other media)

1.1.3 Choose to engage in classroom activities

That’s Not Me: Addressing diversity in media

Teachers who include media literacy in their classrooms often face issues that don’t arise in other subjects. Nothing illustrates this better than the issue of diversity in media. It’s not unreasonable for teachers to see the topic as a can of worms and be concerned about offending students and their parents – not to mention worrying about what the students themselves might say. At the same time, it’s a topic that is simply too important to be ignored: what we see in media hugely influences how we see others, ourselves and the world. As a result, an ability to analyze media depictions of diversity is not only a key element of being media literate, it’s essential to understanding many of the social issues and concerns that we face as citizens. That’s why Media Awareness Network has developed That’s Not Me – a new online tutorial for professional development to help educators and community leaders approach this issue through key concepts of media literacy.

Outcome Chart - Nova Scotia - Advanced English 11

Outcome Chart - Nova Scotia - Advanced English Grade 11

Impact of Online Hate

Online hate can have an impact in three interconnected ways:

• the harm done to its targets, either from personal harassment or from online spaces being experienced as hostile;
• the risk that those who encounter it may be radicalized by it, becoming more sympathetic and possibly even active; and
• the effect that it has on the values and culture of the online spaces in which it happens.

Strategies for Fighting Cyberbullying

Cyberbullying is everyone’s business and the best response is a pro-active or preventative one. From the outset, we can reduce the risks associated with internet use if we engage in an open discussion with our children about their online activities and set up rules that will grow along with them. Cyberbullying is strongly connected with moral disengagement – the ways we can fool ourselves into thinking it’s all right to do something we know is wrong or to not do something we know is right – so activating kids’ empathy and moral judgment is a key aspect of preventing both offline and online bullying.

Media and Girls

They have ads of how you should dress and what you should look like and this and that, and then they say, 'but respect people for what they choose to be like.' Okay, so which do we do first?" 

Kelsey, 16, quoted in Girl Talk