n April 2008, Perez-Tornero received an urgent commission from UNESCO to draft a textbase to develop a curriculum for teacher training in media and information literacy. There were already some precedents in the shape of previous work carried out by Perez-Tornero for UNESCO. In 2002, in a joint UNESCO and European Commission project, MENTOR, Perez-Tornero and Tayie led a group of international experts who prepared a media education curriculum for teachers in the Mediterranean area. In 2004, Perez-Tornero conducted another study for the European Commission, promoting Digital Literacy, in which he stated the need to foster a change in media culture and communication skills for which the training of teachers was crucial. This issue had arisen in another study conducted by the same author, also for the European Commission («Study on Current Trends and Approaches to Media Literacy in Europe») in which teacher training and the development of a curriculum on media information literacy was deemed essential. But there were other more significant precedents. In fact, since UNESCO began to deal with media education on an international level (the Grunwald Declaration in 1982 followed in 1990 by Toulouse; Vienna, 1999; Seville, 2002 and Paris, 2007), the need for a media education curriculum and teacher training has gained in urgency, supported by proposals from pioneering studies on the subject by Masterman, Pugente, Duncan, Balzaguette, Gonnet and others. Why precisely in 2008 did UNESCO launch the idea of developing a global curriculum with regard to the training of teachers? Certainly, the reasons are many but some are truly striking: A) In 2008, the Summit of the Information Society of the United Nations (Geneva, 2002 and Tunis, 2005) had already been overtaken by the need to constitute societies of knowledge in which media and information literacy was to be decisive; B)At that time almost all education systems worldwide were undertaking curricular reforms that placed the development of student skills at the center of the system, among the most important being the digital skills related to new media; C) It was also unquestionably the time to integrate the Internet and ICTs in the classroom. For that reason, the renewal of skills and the training of teachers became a must; D) Furthermore, the development of Web 2.0 (whose concept emerged in 2004) was rendering obsolete the out-dated distinction between education’s usage of the media, and education and its position with respect to the media, because for the first time media could be used in a general and creative way in terms of educational systems that was not just responsive. Teachers and students could now become producers, creators and communicators; E) At that time, the globalization of the media had taken such a giant step forward that upgrading universal education strategies I DOI: 10.3916/C39-2012-02-00