Melissa Cole New Media & New Literacies

Growing up, I never played many video games. I know that I’ll be dating myself here, but I remember when my older brother would bring home Sega Genesis games that he would borrow from his friends to play on his console. As older brothers do, he never allowed me to have a turn, so much of my “gaming experience” comes from peering over his shoulder as he spent hours playing games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter and Sonic & Knuckles. Though I never had much of an affinity for gaming and will admit that I could have been counted amongst those curmudgeonly voices asking kids to abandon this form of “frivolous entertainment” (Lynch, 2021, p. 120) and get out and play, researchers like Abrams and Gerber (Lynch, 2021) show us just how misguided that attitude is. Abrams and Gerber enumerate the many benefits of video games highlighting them as forms of authentic assessment within educational settings, with Shaffer (2010) lauding them for cultivating problem solving skills.  The Inter...

Inspired by a discussion amongst fellow colleagues in my graduate program, I have decided to explore two K-12 digital communication tools, ClassDojo and ParentSquare . While I have used ClassDojo both as a teacher (at a previous school) and am now becoming acquainted with it as a guardian in the current school year, I wasn’t familiar with ParentSquare at all, that is, until other teachers in my program raved about it.  With that, let’s take a closer look at each of the two digital platforms and learn more about how they function, influence communication, impact learning and more. ClassDojo ClassDojo is a digital communication tool that allows teachers and families to connect. In their words, it’s “[w]here classrooms become communities” (ClassDojo, n.d.). In short, teachers can use ClassDojo (or just “Dojo” for short as my colleagues and I called it) to send mass messages to families or communicate via private message. ClassDojo harkens popular social media platforms with their Cl...

I remember watching The Oprah Winfrey Show with my mother (…and sometimes without her) after school as a teenager. For any of you that don’t know the show well, Oprah frequently brought on thought leaders and authors as guests.  Just as cellphones had started to become ubiquitous, Oprah had on a guest that proclaimed that the idea of civility must now be redefined given the introduction of these devices into our society. Should we turn off our phones in class? At dinner? Are our landlines strictly for professional acquaintances or close family? Is it “unprofessional” to have a DMX song set as your ringtone? When it comes to technology, the only constant is change. Just as the advent of cellphones required that we reexamine what it means to be civil, new technology keeps us on our toes, too, I think when it comes to ethics.  When I was an undergraduate student in the early 2000s, I remember one professor had to consider whether we could use Wikipedia as a source (she allowed i...

Perhaps our students know how to close a tab on a web browser or maybe they can conduct a cursory Google search to help them discover answers to burning questions like whether Frida Kahlo is still alive (a real and recent question from my second-grade class during our Hispanic Heritage Month celebration), but as Jacobson (2017) explains, our students’ digital literacy aren’t necessarily transferrable skills, namely when they are asked to look “beyond the screen.”  Citing research out of Stanford, Jacobson (2017) shares about students: “…when it comes to evaluating information that flows through social media channels, they are easily duped.” This means that for our precious “digital natives” (Philip & Garcia, 2013), their ability to gauge that someone’s Instagram profile only shows the world a glamorized “highlights reel” version of their life or that the “breaking news” they just read on some blogger’s X account is actually “fake news” isn’t something that comes natural to them...

These days, if you’re talking about New York City public schools, then rumblings of a potential cellphone ban will inevitably “enter the chat.” While New York City Schools Chancellor David Banks ultimately decided against moving forward with a ban for the current school year, in an interview with CBS News, he acknowledges that the issue is “complicated” (Kramer, 2019) yet still, he continues to echo his stance that phones are a “real distraction.” Banks also tells CBS that he has yet to hear "anybody make the case for why cellphones have a benefit in our classrooms."  But the International Literacy Association (ILA, 2018) did make a case for cellphones in classrooms. They cited an example of an ELA class where once-quiet students emerged as “literacy leaders and experts within the classroom community” (p. 4) when cellphones were allowed (and even integrated) within instruction. In the Digital Age we live in, I think fashioning cellphones into this sort of “Boogeyman” would on...

Gone are the days when we could simply define literacy as “the ability of people to read and write” (UNESCO, 2017, as cited in Beecher, 2023). In today’s Digital Age, technological advances and societal changes demand that we expand our “conventional view of literacy” (Sang, 2017).  As our world evolves, so must our definition of what it means to be literate. Enter new literacies.  Beecher (2023) succinctly affirms that today, “literacy includes technology.” Sang (2016) broadens the scope of that definition, adding that new literacies call for us to abandon “standardized forms of language that only reflects the dominant language and culture.” The National Council of Teacher of English’s (NCTE, 2019) idea of new literacies is laid out by way of their comprehensive framework. Adding to our definition of new literacies, NCTE maintains that “active, successful participants in a global society” should “promote culturally sustaining communication and recognize the bias and privileg...