Abstract
This paper focuses on the influence of media in the educational system and the need for the curricula improvements, Albanian primary education case. Living in the digital era, people are definitely faced with many challenges, mainly regarding the vast information which is often excessive and comes from a variety of sources. The information students are provided with, is not always true or the appropriate knowledge they have to acquire.
In this sense, the target group that is mostly exposed to this issue are the primary and even secondary school children who do not have the maturity to analyze, filter and select what the internet offers them. Students graduating from K-12 education need media literacy skills to engage, participate, and learn in a world in which literacy must keep pace with rapidly changing technologies.
In this context, school leaders can play a very important educational and sensitizing role and become supporters of media literacy projects. Moreover, the transformative influence of principals in fostering teacher professional development emerges as a critical catalyst for literacy improvement. Leadership influence is essential in finding the instruments to improve the curricula and involve all the influential factors in raising the awareness and to prepare the future citizens with all the media sources they are living with.
Through surveys, we have collected quantitative and qualitative data from primary school leaders in South Albania regarding their attitude towards media literacy, their knowledge on the subject, as well as their ability and willingness to include media literacy in curricular or extracurricular activities with the goal of educating students from an early age to be capable of successfully facing the challenges of the digital era that are advancing and gaining more and more ground.