Two hundred years ago, literacy meant being able to read and write. Today people find themselves with many literacies in a nation that is considered ninety-nine percent literate. The plethora of literacies has just given birth to another term--transliteracy. Transliteracy is the ability to read, listen to, view, understand, synthesize, and apply what is gathered across differing platforms. This new label is important to cultural literacy, financial literacy, technology literacy, and information literacy as teachers teach flat-world students. Transliteracy is a term that was born out of a need to describe how communication has changed. Alan Liu and Susan Thomas were some of the biggest advocates of the idea that communication has officially evolved into a new multi-communication modality. People have traveled down a communication road that has grown from orality to art, to print, to movies, to musical messages, to multimedia presentations, and to combinations of all of the above. The mode of communication has officially changed. Print is no longer a dominant force. However, instruction still is anchored around print literacy as that is the biggest building block of communication. People now have to read across electronic platforms, apply previous knowledge to a new application, broaden their scope of reading to include critical evaluation for credibility, and apply rules of decoding and encoding to new content platforms, such as video, Skype, blogging, and online discussions to become productive members of society. Doug Ackerman suggests that teachers may be "less literate than their students" as students are able to adapt more readily to new transliteracy models. Therefore, teachers must make an effort to embrace this new mode of operation.