The redefinition of literacy in the 21st century has seen a move away from the traditional view of decoding and encoding text and now considers a vast array of skills, contexts, forms and media. It is, at its heart, though, still about gleaning,, understanding, communicating and relating information. We do need to adapt the ways we teach. Print based materials that formed the curriculum resources of the past have a certain structure to them that needs to be taught. Students need to learn about chapters, contents pages, indexes, imprint information and so on. The new media forms also have structural features that need to be taught. They are just different structures. Where in the past we might have taught students about appropriate subjects for books, as opposed to newspapers, personal letters or business documents, the 21st century media requires students to learn about appropriate content, forms and features of many different types of information delivery systems. But they are still learning about the organisation, purpose and audience of the thing they are ‘reading’ (viewing/constructing/interacting with…). The proliferation of media items that purport to be something they are not (eg an advert disguised as an informative text) requires students to criticially reflect on everything they read or view and connect it to what they know about the topic from other sources. This is not a new skill, however dealing with and synthesising the sheer amount of information and the constant bombardment in every day life is a learned skill that is more important now than at any time in the past. It is vital to ensure that sifting through the barrage of twaddle is a skill taught and taught well in schools and in the wider community.