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Content experts are a necessity, but there is no excuse to be media illiterate

What!? This is an ongoing debate that's been around for years. Even as content continues to be King, the question is, with content changing so rapidly and embedded in new media, aren't we as educators foolish to disregard media?

The connection between reading, writing, communication and new literacies is multi-modal, engaging everyone as learners as a result of its constant, transformative nature. Multiple modalities go beyond traditional ways of communicating—such as pen and paper, keyboard and mouse—to combine old literacies with new ones. This results in increased usability, increased experience that engages learners (Source). 

"Knowing truth from fiction on the Internet is a huge problem," says Kenneth Eastwood, superintendent of Middletown City (N.Y.) School District. "Students might be good researchers, but they tend not to scrutinize the information."

It might seem that evaluating information online-just one form of "new literacy"-and reading a book-more of a foundational literacy-are pretty much the same thing. After all, you can't trust everything you read, either. But there are differences. And those differences, when brought into the classroom and incorporated into curricula, are enriching the educational experiences of many K12 students. Unfortunately, many administrators, although they are beginning to recognize the need to revise their districts' media skills instruction, lack the resources, and more importantly the vision, to bring the new literacies into the classroom.