Lesson Plans for Teachers


NOTE: This page is WIP! This is a new initiative we’re working on and the content should not be considered as official!

Welcome to the Lesson Plan for Teachers section of the Toronto Open Data website! This is a page where grade [6-12] teachers can download activities and lesson plans for their classes.

The objective of these resources is to enable teachers to introduce their students to Toronto Open Data. We hope you can help us challenge the city’s next generation of problem solvers to:

  • Learn about the City of Toronto’s role
  • Engage with the city’s big challenges
  • Work with real city-created data

We invite you to explore the resources on this page. If you have feedback, please send an email to opendata@toronto.ca.

City of Toronto Open Data 101

[Presentation]

Format: Power Point (11 MB)

For: Grade 8 +

Time: 20 minutes

Learning objectives:

  • Learn what the City of Toronto does (i.e., what public services/infrastructure it’s responsible for)
  • Learn what is data + what data the City of Toronto creates over the course of it’s standard operations
  • Learn how to find publicly accessible open data published by the City of Toronto
  • Learn how journalists, community members, academics, and others use open data to help their communities

City Planner for the Day

Activity sheetDownload

Format: Word document (1 MB)

For: Civics students, Grade 9-12

Time: 30 minutes

Learning objectives:

  • Identify local civic issues under the responsibility of the City of Toronto
  • Use the City of Toronto open data website to find data related to the civic issue
  • Explore tabular data and/or data presented on a map

Toronto Open Data Treasure Hunt

Activity sheetDownload

Format: Word document (38 KB)

For: Computer skills students, Beginner-Moderate (requires some data manipulation skills)

Time: 30 minutes

Learning objectives:

  • Use the City of Toronto open data website to search for and find data
  • Download, open, and manipulate .csv data files

Explore Your Neighbourhood Using Data

Activity sheetDownload

Format: Word document (787 KB)

For: Geography students, Grade 8+

Time: 20 minutes

Learning objectives:

  • Use the City of Toronto open data website to search for and find data
  • Identify neighbourhood boundaries from an interactive online map
  • Identify number of public amenities of different types using interactive online maps



We love hearing from educators!

  • Did you use these materials in your classroom? Whether you loved or hated them, we’d love to hear about it at opendata@toronto.ca!
  • Did your students make something cool using Open Data? We’d love to feature them in our Gallery and/or Blog – email us at opendata@toronto.ca!
  • Want to bring the Open Data team to your class for a guest lecture? Email us at opendata@toronto.ca!