Teaching Media: Critically Evaluating Media
In this lesson, students learn how media influence how we see the world and send intentional and unintentional messages.
Images of Learning: Elementary - Lesson
This lesson helps students become more aware of the stereotypes associated with portrayals of students and teachers on TV. (It is also a good follow-up to the elementary lesson TV Stereotypes.)
Reality Check
This public awareness program, created in partnership between MediaSmarts and the Facebook Canadian Election Integrity Initiative, focuses on authentication of online information.
Just a joke? Helping youth respond to casual prejudice
One of the barriers to youth pushing back against prejudice is not wanting to over-react, particularly if they feel their peers were just ‘joking around.’ Humour, however, can often be a cover for intentional bullying and prejudice. In this lesson, students analyze media representations of relational aggression, such as sarcasm and put-down humour, then consider the ways in which digital communication may make it harder to recognize irony or satire and easier to hurt someone’s feelings without knowing it. Students then consider how humour may be used to excuse prejudice and discuss ways of responding to it.
Television Broadcast Ratings - Lesson
This lesson introduces students to the theory behind television ratings and encourages them to explore the commercial pressures driving the medium.