How can The Eggplant support online safety lessons
A useful New Zealand web series for talking about online safety
I’ve been revisiting The Eggplant, a short New Zealand web series made for young audiences, and I reckon it still has a useful place in a secondary media classroom. It follows students through different problematic experiences online, but it does so as fiction and comedy rather than as a list of warnings. That makes the material a bit easier to discuss without turning the lesson into a lecture about terrible decisions teenagers supposedly make.
Why the format matters The episodes are short enough to watch in pieces, which helps when a class has limited time or when you want to pause before the resolution. Students can look at what a character knows, what they assume, who else is watching, and how quickly a private moment can become part of a much larger audience. Those are good questions about narrative and audience as well as online safety.
A practical classroom use I’d probably show one episode without giving students the lesson objective first. Afterwards, they could map the choices made by each character, identify the point where the situation changes, and consider how the same story might look from another person’s perspective. The comedy is worth discussing too. Does it make the advice more memorable, or does it soften the seriousness too much? Different groups may read that quite differently.
Worth saving It is not a complete online-safety curriculum, and I would want to add current school guidance and plenty of space for students to talk about context. Still, The Eggplant offers a distinctly local starting point, with situations that feel closer to the social world students recognise than a generic overseas resource. The full series is available through NZ On Screen, which is also a handy place to find other New Zealand screen material for class.