Creating a Media Smart Generation event

Teaching children about the benefits and dangers of online life is difficult. For one thing, a lot of them know more than you do. What’s more, technology is evolving at such a pace that teaching something one year may be defunct the next.
Tackling these huge problems and others is Media Smart. The programme is designed to respond to the real challenges children face online and how they should be taught to deal with them.

The Creating a Media Smart Generation event, hosted by the Advertising Association at Portcullis House, showcased a film about how bombardment of advertising has made younger boys worried about their looks. It is the exposure to ideas about normality that form children’s ideas about how they look. If they are shown unattainable ideas about how they can look, they are inevitably going to feel dejected when they don’t attain these standards.

As such, teachers need to be equipped to talk to kids about what they see and how they can be happy in themselves. Similarly, Media Smart’s programme tells us that teachers need the skills and tools to show how children can be safe in their everyday practices online and how they are entitled to ownership of their data.

Media Smart is reaching out to all the schools they can to help teachers do this. Around 90% of teachers who have partaken in the programme believe it to be useful and would recommend it to a colleague.

The DMA Talent Division, headed by Kate Burnett has been working on skills development for the younger generation in the area of data and privacy. In developing our educational programmes, we will seek to work more closely with Media Smart to deliver this important programme.