Media Literacy

According to Wikipedia, Media literacy is a repertoire of competences that enable people to analyse, evaluate, and create messages in a wide variety of media modes, genres, and forms.

Media literacy education provides tools to help people critically analyse messages, offers opportunities for learners to broaden their experience of media, and helps them develop creative skills in making their own media messages. Critical analysis can include identifying author, purpose and point of view, examining construction techniques and genres, examining patterns of media representation, and detecting propaganda, censorship, and bias in news and public affairs programming (and the reasons for these). Media literacy education may explore how structural features – such as media ownership, or its funding model – affect the information presented.

Australian Teachers of Media (ATOM) is an independent, non-profit, professional association promoting the study of media literacy. ATOM has established The Education Shop to help promote media literacy in students from primary, through secondary and into tertiary levels of education. Our extensive resources, including books, Blu-rays and DVDs can assist students of media and other subjects to ask questions about what they watch, hear, and read.