New Media & New Literacies

  Online platforms and digital tools are changing K-12 education by shaping how students learn, how teachers instruct, and how families stay connected. Each year, individualized learning and content delivery is being transformed and integrated into curriculum. As both a community college educator and mother, digital technologies within K-12 education vastly impact my everyday life at home and work. Each digital tool and learning platform play a unique role in enhancing student accessibility, communication skills and learning outcomes within diverse populations. In this blog post, let’s dive into two commonly used digital technologies within K-12 education and special education: Google Classroom and Proloquo2Go. By analyzing their functions, impacts, and the necessary literacies required to navigate them, we can then better understand and apply their use.   Google Classroom Google Classroom is a cloud-based learning management system (LMS) that was launched in August of 2...

  Nursing Education with New Literacies through Gamification: Escape Room Implementation A topic that interests me as a nursing educator and what I am thinking about basing my final project on is the integration of escape rooms. This approach to active learning stands out to me because it fosters critical thinking, collaboration, and clinical decision-making in a dynamic and engaging format. Unlike traditional educational methods, escape rooms simulate realistic scenarios that require nursing students and practicing nurses to apply their knowledge and skills to reinforce essential content in a student-led, enjoyable way. At Alfred State College, escape rooms could be used in the nursing skills lab to evaluate skill performance and reinforce these key concepts in areas such as medication safety, patient prioritization, and emergency response protocols. For the medical-surgical nurses at Jones Memorial Hospital, these activities could be adapted for continuing education, competen...

  After reading and reviewing this week’s course material, I recognize that in order to support practices beyond digital screens, this requires the creation of learning experiences that encourage students to connect digital interactions with real-world applications. In the spring 2025 semester, I needed to create a capstone nursing project that focused on direct patient care that was specific to nursing education in the professional role. I decided to focus my project on enhancing the current workflow on providing individualized patient education on chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)- but also with the pursuit to involve senior nursing students as well as drive down hospital readmission rates of acute exacerbations of COPD. Meaning that, patients would be provided education that was individualized and focused on proper long-term management of COPD to better patient outcomes and enhance nursing student’s confidence in providing this education. Because COPD is a progressive...

              The readings by Vanek (2020), and the International Literacy Association (ILA) (2018), describe critical components of digital literacy in education. Within the first reading by Vanek (2020), digital literacy is defined as the ability to use technology to communicate information, analyze, evaluate, create, explore, and become integrated into today’s society. Digital literacy is necessary to participate in today’s society, it is essential and impacts employment, civic engagement, critical thinking, and the ability to process and analyze information. It is shocking to read that over 70% of entry-level service workers do not have the foundational skills necessary for digital problem-solving and two out of three of these workers struggle to use a computer but do anyway. (p. 3) Necessary skills for learners when it comes to digital literacy include the ability to locate and assess credible digital sources, proficiently...

              Within nursing academia and the workforce, new literacies have a significant impact on developing critical thinking as well as patient care experiences. When new literacies are introduced and integrated into nursing curriculum, nursing students view course material and learning objectives from a new perspective (Potts & Schaller, 2024). New literacies practices are increasingly pertinent to integrate into nursing academia as the digitally demanding and evolving nursing workforce utilizes literacies to align with nursing communication, information management, and patient care. By definition, new literacies extend beyond the narrow definition of traditional reading and writing (Sang, 2017). Literacies include culture, digital technologies, and can take on many forms such as podcasts, virtual learning platforms, and social media accounts like X. Multiliteracies such as pictures, gestures, and different forms of l...

Hi, my name is Taylor Craft, and I’m from Alfred, NY. I’ve been a nurse for nine years, working primarily in medical-surgical nursing with experience in other areas including home health, OR, OB, ICU, and outpatient care. I currently serve as an Assistant Professor of Nursing at SUNY Alfred State College, where I teach lectures, lead senior skills labs, and instruct freshman clinical groups. This is my final class in the MSN in Nursing Education program- yay! I’m a mom to three boys and 2 dogs. I love to run, bake, and read curled up by my fireplace or out in the sunshine. My husband is also a nurse. I'm excited to get started on this course and to get out of my comfort zone!  😊  My learning goals for this course include gaining a deeper understanding of how digital tools and emerging media can enhance engagement and accessibility in nursing education. I’m especially interested in exploring how different forms of media, such as video, interactive content, and social platforms...