Fair Dealing for Media Education

In Canada, consumers have certain rights to use copyrighted material without permission or license from the owner of the copyright. These rights are defined in the Copyright Act as Fair Dealing exemptions and were redefined in the 2012 changes to the Act. A good knowledge of Fair Dealing can be extremely helpful in understanding what you and your students can do with media in class. It's important to note that the Copyright Act provides very little definition for many of these terms; instead, most of the specifics of Fair Dealing have come from court rulings, and the new exemptions and other changes done in 2012 will likely also be further defined in the same way.

New online resources for teachers

The Web is full of great online resources for teachers and students, with new material appearing every day. With the arrival of National Media Education Week, teachers may be looking for fresh ideas to bring media education into the classroom. Here’s a quick overview of recently created (or recently discovered) resources that may help:

DIY Media: Mashups, fan movies, and machinima

This is the second in a series of columns looking at the history and future of Web 2.0. In the last instalment of this series we examined the origins of the Do-It-Yourself (DIY) ethic and some of the issues around the definition of “user-created content.” Turning from the theoretical to the practical, we'll now take a look at just what is actually out there, and begin to examine some of the ethical and legal implications.

Career Education

Career Development 10 “prepares students with broad strokes to prepare for the workplace.”[1]  Alongside learning self-assessment and increasing their self-awareness, students will “examine the changing world of work and analyse ways they can be prepared for a future that is constantly evolving.”[2]  Financial literacy makes up a large part of this course because students will be introduced to “budgeting, financial decision making and money management strategies…”[3] Career Development 11 carries on from its precursor, by “building on students’ developing personal and financial aw

Using Parental Controls

There are lots of ways of limiting what content your kids can see online, which apps and programs they can access and how much time they can spend online. What tools are available depends on what kind of device they’re using, and what browser they use to access the web.

Supporting healthy media experiences for kids

Factors to keep in mind when prioritizing kids' media health

Children under two should spend as little time with screen devices as possible, except for video-chats with people they know offline and reading e-books with an adult or sibling.

News you can use

Online news is one of the hardest things to verify. Sometimes early reports that turn out not to be true still circulate on the Internet, and people may spread false reports for commercial or malicious reasons, or even just for “fun.”