New Media and New Literacies

The idea of designing a classroom through spaces is to use different modes of engagement and create an environment that supports diverse learning needs.  The primary thing is to understand the concept of designing classroom activities across spaces. It means that we have to organize physical and virtual areas in a way that promotes engagement, collaboration, and interactions between students. By adopting such activities, we create spaces to respond to the diverse students' needs like multiple intelligences, different learning styles, neurotypical and neurodivergent populations, and students with various disabilities. According to Garcia, “As educators, we should be more apt to challenge the kinds of digital literacy practices expected in our classrooms and to consider how these practices can better mirror the world around us, engage our senses, and facilitate authentic learning.”(Garcia). I believe that creating a learning environment that integrates both the real and virtual world...

Digital literacy is the “ability to navigate, consume, create, and communicate online information appropriately in the digital world."  (“Digital literacy” NCTE 2019). In the last quarter of the century, we have moved from traditional literacy to new literacies based on technological development. Within these new literacies, we are developing a "multitude of proficiencies", such as digital problem-solving, media literacy, basic computer skills, network literacy, and information literacy. We must develop the skills that matter for digital literacy, like critical thinking, communication, processing and analyzing information, self-awareness, problem-solving, and navigating systems (“Digital literacy” NCTE 2019). These skills need to be developed by both students and educators. Looking back at the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a time when, within a few days, educators worldwide had to become professionals in online teaching and using digital tools to teach students how to nav...

New literacies extend beyond traditional literacies because they refer to the skills and strategies helping us effectively use and interpret information in the digital world. While traditional literacies focus on reading and writing text, new literacies integrate technology and multimodality. They emphasize interaction and collaboration, as well as critical and analytical skills. According to the Expanded Territories of “Literacy:" New Literacies and Multiliteracies (Sang, 2017) , there is “ a new belief (“mindset”) to see the world has changed fundamentally due to the utilization of new technologies, rather than using new tools to do the old work only in more “technologized ways” (Lankshear & Knobel, 2007)”. Indeed, thinking of it, technology has affected not only literacy and the ways of transmitting information but it has changed our mindset because it started impacting us in many ways; personal, educational, professional and social.  New literacies became relevant to our p...