About This Webinar
Students today encounter biased, emotionally charged, and harmful messages at increasingly young ages—often before they have the social-emotional development or critical awareness to evaluate what they see and hear. By ages 6–7, children begin internalizing messages about intelligence, worth, power, race, and gender roles. When unaddressed, these early influences can shape students’ confidence, mental health, peer relationships, and behavior at school, with effects that become more pronounced as students move into adolescence.
This webinar is designed for teachers seeking practical, developmentally appropriate ways to support student wellness while addressing bias and harmful influences beginning in K–5 settings. Participants will explore how young students encounter and respond to online content, how these experiences show up in classrooms and school culture, and how early instruction can strengthen social-emotional growth, empathy, and resilience. The session also connects elementary experiences to challenges educators see in grades 6–12—such as peer conflict, identity-based harm, and harmful online influences—while highlighting resources that support older students and families.
Participants will be introduced to Developing & Using Critical Comprehension (DUCC), an evidence-based, K–5 curriculum aligned with ISTE, CASEL, and Common Core State Standards. Lessons can be embedded into reading and writing, science, social studies, and civics, supporting academic goals while strengthening emotional self-awareness and healthy responses to online content. The free curriculum has been reviewed and approved by the American Academy of Pediatrics and is used in classrooms across 27 U.S. states and Canada.
Teachers will guide students in recognizing how online content is designed to persuade or manipulate. These lessons disrupt cycles that spread stereotypes and harmful messaging. The curriculum combines critical comprehension with social-emotional learning to help students reflect and talk about how online content makes them feel.
Participants will leave with a ready-to-use curriculum and strategies for engaging families in conversations about digital behavior, mental health, and gender equity. By laying these foundations in K–5 classrooms, educators can foster school cultures where K-12 students critically engage with digital content, challenge biased messaging, support equity for all peers, and grow into responsible citizens.
Want more sessions to choose from? Check out all of the free, for-credit webinars in Share My Lesson's Summer of Learning 2026 series.
Executive Summary from On24 AI:
The webinar outlined how early and sustained digital literacy instruction can strengthen student wellness, equity, and resilience by reducing vulnerability to online manipulation, harassment, and radicalizing content. Presenters highlighted a major gap between children’s heavy daily screen use and the late introduction of digital literacy in many districts, then introduced “Daniel the Duck” (K–5), a free, research-based curriculum that builds critical thinking and social-emotional skills through modular lessons, videos, games, and classroom posters focused on chat safety, AI interactions, information reliability, respectful disagreement, advertising tactics, and filter bubbles; pilot results showed measurable gains in student digital literacy, especially among younger learners.
For grades 6–12, the session emphasized how algorithms can reinforce identity-driven echo chambers and escalate harmful behaviors, particularly misogyny and sexist harassment, and recommended practical classroom strategies centered on belonging, perspective-taking, and separating feelings from facts. Educators were given actionable tools including the CARE method for real-time intervention, peer-led approaches such as student-created zines and Students Against Sexual Harassment (SASH) clubs, and curated resources on misogyny, sextortion, and emerging digital harms like deepfakes, with a strong recommendation to align efforts with parents through trainings and school community partnerships.
They shared excellent resources for all learners on this very important and challenging topic.