CIRA and MediaSmarts launch cyber safety resource for schools
CIRA and MediaSmarts have jointly launched Shields Up For Cyber Safety, a classroom resource designed to help Canadian secondary students develop practical online safety skills. The lesson plan was unveiled on 14 October at RALLY 2026, a national gathering for digital media literacy educators.
Developed by MediaSmarts in collaboration with CIRA, the resource is aimed at students in Grades 7 to 9. It asks pupils to take on the role of "digital safety strategists," drawing on their own online experiences to identify common security risks and match those risks to appropriate tools and countermeasures. Activities include guided discussion, independent practice and team-based exercises.
The lesson plan also introduces students to CIRA Canadian Shield, a free DNS-based filtering service that CIRA offers to Canadians. By weaving a live product into the curriculum, CIRA is effectively embedding a consumer acquisition channel into the educational resource, which educators may wish to note when assessing the material for classroom use.
The resource will be available in both English and French and carries curriculum connections to provincial and territorial frameworks across Canada.
Market context
Cybersecurity education at the secondary level has grown substantially as a policy priority in the UK, US, Canada and Australia over the past five years, driven by rising rates of phishing, account compromise and online harm among young people. National bodies including the UK's National Cyber Security Centre and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have published school-facing guidance, and several jurisdictions have moved to embed cyber safety into core computing or digital literacy curricula.
Canada's approach has historically been fragmented across provinces, but CIRA and MediaSmarts both operate nationally and have existing distribution channels into schools through teacher associations and provincial ministries. MediaSmarts is a 30-year-old charitable organisation with an established reputation for media literacy research and curriculum materials, which should ease adoption.
Regulatory and policy read-across
The launch comes as Canadian policymakers continue to debate online harms legislation, with the federal government's Online Harms Act having attracted significant attention to children's digital safety. School-based cyber literacy programmes are increasingly cited as a complementary measure to platform-level regulation: they address user behaviour rather than content supply, and they are generally non-controversial across party lines.
Jon Ferguson, Vice President of Cybersecurity and DNS at CIRA, said the collaboration was intended to help students "develop the skills and habits that will keep them safer online for years to come." Kathryn Ann Hill, an executive at MediaSmarts, described the resource as "an easy and fun way to teach online safety in the classroom."
The resource is available immediately at mediasmarts.ca/shields-up. The next milestone for the partnership is likely to be uptake data from the current academic year, which would indicate whether the curriculum connections are strong enough to drive meaningful classroom adoption across provinces.