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Most kids see hate and prejudice online, and most of them say it’s important to do something about it. But whether you’ve seen a video that’s full of racist conspiracy theories or have just seen a friend share an offensive meme, it can be hard to know what to do about it.
In the educational game A Day in the Life of the Jos (Licensed Resource), students in grades six to eight help the brother and sister team Jo and Josie with situations they encounter online as they go about a typical day in their lives.
Level: Grades 9 to 12
About the Author: Matthew Johnson, Director of Education, MediaSmarts
Duration: 1 to 1 ½ hours, plus time for the assessment/evaluation activity
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.
The Respecting Yourself and Others Online workshop was created to provide tweens and young teens with strategies and knowledge that will help them respect themselves, respect others and respect the space when using social media.
This lesson helps students to reflect upon, understand and filter the many media messages within political platforms and around political personalities.
This is the first of three lessons that address gender stereotypes. The objective of this lesson is to encourage students to develop their own critical intelligence with regard to culturally inherited stereotypes, and to the images presented in the media - film and television, rock music, newspapers and magazines.
Framed around key concepts of media literacy, the Facing Online Hate tutorial examines how the Internet is used to spread and incite hate, how radicalization occurs, and how youth encounter hate online both through traditional hate sites and “cultures of hatred”. The tutorial also provides strategies for building critical thinking skills in young people to help them understand the nature of online hate, how they may be targets and how to respond appropriately when bias, stereotyping and hatred are encountered online.
In this lesson, students explore the absence, or unrealistic portrayal, of consequences to violence in the media.
This lesson helps children become aware of the types of violence that appear on television, the frequency with which these acts occur, and how they respond to these acts. It begins with a guided discussion about the different types of violence and then,how violence is portrayed on TV.
This lesson teaches children that television doesn’t always offer the best solutions to conflict.
This is the fourth of five lessons designed to teach students to think critically about the way aboriginal peoples and visible minorities are portrayed in the press.
This lesson develops a beginning awareness by students of how they feel towards, and respond to, different sports, and how the media represents athletics.
In this lesson, students identify stereotypical images of girls and women as represented by female action heroes.
In this lesson students learn about the systems used to classify films, TV programs and video games. Students are asked to take a critical look at the criteria applied to classify these media products, and then take into account and discuss the underlying social and political aspects arising from those systems.