What exactly is media literacy? I did a Google search for this answer and found some official sounding definitions, but Dr. Peter DeBenedittis defined it best on his website. He says “Media literacy is the ability to "read" television and mass media.” Our students have grown up being inundated by messages through the media, but do they know how to read these messages? Our children need to know how to differentiate correct information from the wrong information. My six year old daughter loves to watch her “kid shows”, but it drives me crazy when during the commercials, she sees some product and immediately believes everything in the commercial. This marketing is the whole point of commercials obviously, but we can’t believe everything we see on TV. TV is not the only form of media that we have to deal with anymore. With the wide usage of the Internet by today’s students, students must be able to decide what is reliable and validated. Is Wikipedia always accurate? While it is a good place to go to get some preliminary information, it is not wholly reliable. The information contained on Wikipedia is entered by anybody. The people who write the articles are not necessarily experts on the subject matter. So what do we do about this?

One answer to this question is to teach our students media literacy in the classroom. According to the Center for Media Literacy, there are 10 main benefits to doing this. One of the first ones listed is that teaching Media Literacy “Meets the needs of students to be wise consumers of media, managers of information and responsible producers of their ideas using the powerful multimedia tools of a global media culture.” As I stated earlier, our children and students are being inundated with so many messages through the media (think about election years) and they need to be able to sift through this information. As our society grows more global and more reliant on technology, the media will grow along with us. If our students do not know how to read this information, they will be lost in the future.