New Brunswick - Social Studies 9

Civics

Big Idea: Civic Engagement

Skills Descriptor:

Take age-appropriate actions that demonstrate the rights and responsibilities of citizenship (local, national, and global).

Achievement Indicators:

Outcome Chart - British Columbia - Social Studies Grade 10

This outcome chart contains media education learning outcomes from the British Columbia, Grade 10 Social Studies curriculum, with links to supporting resources on the MediaSmarts site.

How to Train Your Algorithm

In this lesson, students will learn about algorithms and how they function, particularly recommendation algorithms utilized by popular apps like YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Netflix. Students explore the role of optimization goals such as watch time, engagement, and daily active use in shaping the content algorithms prioritize. Through activities like “red teaming,” students will critically analyze the potential downsides and biases of these optimization goals. Students will also discover how to train algorithms by providing both explicit inputs through actions like liking and sharing, and understand the implications of implicit inputs gathered from their online activity. Finally, students design their own algorithm for an app of their choice, identifying which goals it should be optimized for and how they should be weighted as well as what inputs it should use.

Behaving Ethically Online: Ethics and Values

In this lesson, students consider how we come to hold values and how they affect our behaviour, especially online. They begin by comparing their assumptions about how common positive and negative online behaviours are with accurate statistics, and then consider how believing that something is more or less common than it really is can affect whether or not we think it’s acceptable. The teacher then uses a fable to introduce students to the ways that values can be communicated both overtly and implicitly and students discuss the ways in which their values have been communicated to them. They then turn specifically to the online context and consider what values they have learned about online behaviour and how they learned them. Students then consider scenarios where different values may be in conflict and consider ways of resolving them, then develop their own moral dilemma scenarios.

Saskatchewan - Arts Education - Drama 10

Overall Expectations:

CP10.1 Investigate inspiration and departure points for dramatic work.

Specific Expectations:

a. Use personal narratives to explore concepts of memory, history and experiences relating to identity (e.g., cultural, gender expression, urban or rural perspectives, pop culture influences, sexual orientation, social status, youth or elder, immigrant). 

b. Generate ideas for exploration through improvisation and devised scene-work.

Outcome Chart - Manitoba - Business Innovations 9 (10S/10E/10M)

Overall Expectations: Demonstrate awareness of digital footprints

Almost half of Canadian youth say they see racist or sexist content online often

New research conducted during the pandemic by MediaSmarts found almost half of Canadian youth (47%) ages 12 to 17 see racist or sexist content online at least once a week. These findings are shared in MediaSmarts’ new Encountering Harmful and Discomforting Content Online report, which is the second in a series of reports in the latest phase of Young Canadians in a Wireless World, a national survey of 1,058 youth ages 9 to 17 conducted in Autumn 2021.

Data Privacy Week: New research shows youth are more concerned about their online privacy than ever

January 24, 2023 - MediaSmarts is releasing new research today, during Data Privacy Week, which shows that youth are more aware than ever of privacy concerns online and want to take steps to protect their own privacy, but they don’t always know how.

Media Literacy for the 2024 Provincial General Election in British Columbia

This lesson package is designed to be modular, allowing teachers to choose activities that are most relevant to their students. The lesson includes: an opening “minds on” activity that introduces essential concepts of election-related misinformation, helps students retrieve prior knowledge, and shows the relevance of the topic;  several activities which teachers can choose from based on the needs and context of their classes; a closing activity that introduces students to different strategies for verifying election-related information, including the idea of turning to a best single source (in this case, Elections BC). They then learn and practice engaging in active citizenship by responding to election-related disinformation.

When it comes to posting photos on social media, teens are anything but spontaneous, new study shows

Ottawa (April 19, 2017) – A new study released today by the not-for-profit organization MediaSmarts and researchers from The eQuality Project shows how teens carefully compose, select, and edit the photos they share on social media to build and maintain a consciously crafted image. The report To Share or Not to Share: How teens make privacy decisions about photos on social media reveals how teens decide what photos to share online and the pressure they feel to always post images that show them in the best possible light – while not standing out from the crowd.