News
Bringing Digital Literacy Education to Ontario Classrooms
Jun 9, 2025
Tiffany Kwok and Sanjana Shah create new digital literacy learning tools for kids
By Nina Rafeek Dow
Today’s children and teens are growing up in a flood of media—and the tide continues to rise.
In fact, if we include the content Canadians see on TV, on our computers and cellphones, on billboards, in books to the content we see online, the average person today processes 74 gigabytes of information per day—that’s like watching 16 movies every day.
News and media consumption habits are drastically changing as well. According to our Survey of Online Harms 2025, the top news source for young people (between 16 and 30) are YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Throw in artificial intelligence (AI)-based content creation tools and platform algorithms, and the media landscape becomes increasingly complex.
Social media algorithms shape the types of content that comes up on a person’s feed, whether it’s what’s suggested to you or who you follow, reinforcing the “echo chambers” of the types of content a user is exposed to while limiting other content one might potentially encounter. This can prevent a person from knowing the full picture of a world issue or news story, for example.
AI tools are, for the most part, easy to use, and make content look polished. The content publishing capabilities of these tools makes it difficult to distinguish whether it was made by a credible news publication or in someone’s basement.
For a child or young teenager who has not yet developed the critical thinking skills required to discern credible information from misinformation, this can be overwhelming. And as AI tools grow in sophistication, it’s becoming more and more difficult to tell fact from fiction.
Partnering with Ontario Ministry of Education on digital literacy education
Issues concerning kids and media consumption have been at the forefront of efforts to modernize Ontario’s education curriculum. In 2023, a digital literacy discipline was added to the curriculum in response to this new and perpetually changing media landscape.
The Dais’ Policy Analyst Tiffany Kwok and Junior Policy Analyst, Sanjana Shah responded to the Ministry’s call for proposal to submit lesson plan materials.
The Dais Digital Literacy Toolkit lesson plans are named for the three topics they cover: Deepfakes and Synthetic Media, Mis- and Disinformation and Responsible Use of Social Media for News.
The researchers felt it was important to complement these lesson plans with existing digital literacy resources, so as not to duplicate what was already published. The topics reflect recent technological and media changes, such as the prevalence of deep fakes with the rise of AI use, Bill C-11’s impact on social media news consumption, and growing concerns about social media’s harmful effects.
Kwok and Shah also chose to focus on these quickly emerging digital literacy areas due to a dearth of expert resources on this rapidly emerging topic. “I think a lot of worries about these topics are because they’re fairly new. And so we were able to identify that gap because some of these things are emerging right now,” Shah said.
The challenge: implementing digital literacy education into Ontario classrooms
Combining their knowledge and understanding of the school system, as well as leveraging guidance from teachers, education advisors, academics and nonprofit organizations, the team put together a lesson plan for students in grades four to nine. They explain that though the topics are customized for a respective grade level, they are adaptable to other grade levels.
“It’s more important than ever for kids to be educated on digital literacy because it helps form their critical thinking, their understanding of what they’re seeing online and to know that not everything you see online is real,” Kwok said.
One tricky part to creating these lesson plans, Shah explained, was presenting the learning materials in a way that students and teachers can engage with them in a classroom setting. “One of the things that we thought about a lot was how do you teach digital media literacy without relying exclusively on screens?,” she said.
To address this, the team created worksheet-based group activities, analyzing situation-based tasks through card games and reflection exercises, so that students could work through the concepts together and build the critical thinking and processing skills needed to make sense of the online world.
“Because it’s tactile, and physical and not digital, it actually is more natural to slow down, and it helps people form those instincts, such that hopefully, when they’re on a screen and are exposed to a similar situation, they’re able to slow down in a similar way,” Shah explained.
The WROTS acronym: a unique feature of the digital literacy lesson plans
One feature of the lesson plans is the WROTS acronym, created by Kwok and Shah.
The WROTS framework, Who, Reason, Other Trustworthy Sources, was designed to help young people navigate digital media with greater clarity and skepticism. As Kwok noted, “even if it might not answer all your questions, it offers a good framework to approach what you’re seeing.”
Drawing on common principles across digital media literacy content, WROTS emphasizes two core skills: questioning the intention behind a post (“what’s the reason someone’s posting it?”) and practicing lateral reading, or consulting other trustworthy sources to verify information.
As Shah pointed out, people aren’t likely to retain “a checklist of 17 things,” but a simple acronym like WROTS offers “an easy starting point to ask the right questions that orient people in the right direction.”
The researchers hope that teachers across the province download and incorporate the lesson plans into the digital literacy teaching curriculum. And due to the rapidly changing media landscape, they’re keen to know how the lesson plans are received by students and how they can iterate on them in the future.
“My only hope is that we’re able to get it out to as many people as possible,” Kwok said.
As kids and technology are at the centre of growing concern across Canada, the Dais is leading the charge on how we build healthier, smarter relationships with tech at home and in the classroom.
Check out Screen Break, the first Canada-wide program to support students, parents, educators, and policymakers in navigating a new, necessary reality: phone-free classrooms.