Media Literacy

Media literacy is the ability for someone to appropriately access, evaluate, analyze, and create media content. It comes about from being a critical thinker, problem solver, having social and communicative skills, and understanding personal autonomy. Media literacy allows people to effectively use the various media’s that are in the world today.

I think it is highly necessary for students, as young as primary school, to learn about media literacy and become media literate. With the highly growing technological advances, whether we like it or not, young children are being exposed to various medias on a daily basis. I believe that it is necessary to teach them media literacy skills so they can effectively use media. If they are already encountering media, why not try to teach them about it?

In relation to social media, I believe that nothing further than safe online practices should be taught. I do not believe that schools should be responsible for teaching students how to create and use social media, but rather teach students safe online practices. Most students will learn how to use social media on their own, as they are exposed to it on a day to day basis. I believe it should be up to the parent to decide whether or not their child should learn about the social media site. The school should only be a place where the child learns what is safe and what is dangerous to do on social media sites. I believe that if the school were to begin teaching about social media in lower education, we would have very angry parents who are trying to keep their children away from the social media sites as long as possible. All in all, the school teach the safe practices of online use, not the how to’s.

Leave a Reply


You are commenting using your account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Google+ photo


Connecting to %s