Preparing for Transition to Professional Practice: Creating a Simulated Blog and Reflective Journaling Activity

Newly registered nurses often feel challenged during the transition to professional practice. Faculty has a responsibility to create teaching and learning strategies that bring forth the desired technical and cognitive behaviors needed to practice professional nursing. Using present-day technology, faculty at one school of nursing created an innovative teaching and learning strategy in the form of a simulated computer blogging and reflective journaling activity. Lauren’s Blog is about a fictitious newly registered nurse, Lauren, transitioning to the professional role. Lauren is similar to most new registered nurses in that she faces many challenges and triumphs personally and professionally during her 1st year of professional practice. Students identified with the realistic issues Lauren encountered and used learned problem-solving, decision-making, and critical reasoning processes to personally analyze the same situations. The simulated blog concept is easily adaptable to all levels of students across the nursing curriculum.