The Importance Of Media Literacy Education

Register to read the introduction… According to the authors media literacy education needs to be linked with the goals of literacy as a whole, and implemented from kindergarten all the way through high school. Too often implementation of technology into classrooms focuses only on acquiring the skills to simply use it. Media literacy education would expand this focus to include the skills needed to criticize media culture as well as producing alternative media, much in the same way that we teach reading and writing today. …show more content…
This is a hurdle not only in the need to obtain funding, but also to remove the stigma attached to technology's inclusion in the classroom, especially at the younger level. The views towards technology inclusion may only change as better practices for included it become standard, but at the present moment, many federal and local grants exist to ease the financial burden. At the federal level these grants include the Technology Literacy Challenge Fund and the Star Schools Programs, as well as several grants related to teacher training from the National Science Foundation, which because their goal is to equip teachers with the skills to include technology instruction over a variety of disciplines, might also apply to the skills needed for media literacy instruction. The funding needs of media literacy education come in two parts. The first task faced by school administrators is to aquire funding to purchase the media technologies necessary to implement this new curriculum, such as computers, video cameras and the like. The second goal is to allocate funding to be used in teacher training. If we expect our students to be literate in the latest forms of cummucation, than our teachers should be as