Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action by Renee Hobbs

Renee Hobbs' book talks about the importance for people to become more effective in finding information online, getting jobs, and using all of the resources available to them in an efficient manner. This book stresses the need for increasing media literacy in all of America's citizens.  She believes that visual literacy is very important as well as written information.  People express themselves using images and icons, and we need to be able to decipher them. Media literacy is extremely important because of the enormous amount of media we now have available to us, like TV, internet, movies, newspapers, magazines, radio, etc. We should all be able to use these resources properly and to our advantage. With all the new ways for people to interact with each other online, like Facebook, Twitter and Myspace, many hazards come along with it, which is why media literacy is so extremely important for us to understand. She stresses several big ideas: access, critical thinking skills, power of creativity, and the skill of reflection.

Access is about reading competency and knowing how to use a tool. Critical thinking skills are needed to understand and dissect all the messages we are fed every day through internet and TV. The power of people to share their creativity with others and teach strangers how to do something is invaluable. Anyone can be can be an author, an artist, a game maker, or create something that can be viewed by millions of people at the click of a button. Since access and sharing is so easy nowadays, reflection is of the utmost importance. We all have a social responsibility to know the impact of our behaviors and our comments on other people. Teaching our students media literacy is becoming more and more important the more we use technology in our classrooms. Therefore, I would definitely recommend this book to teachers and parents. For more on 'Digital and Media Literacy: A Plan of Action', see the video below: