Connections between Literacy and Curriculum

Literacy project
Curriculum Project

   For my Literacy in Middle/ High and Curriculum in Middle/High classes, I had to recently created and presented two projects to small groups. These projects let us explore our understanding on literacy and what our curriculum philosophy is focused around. We had to make both of these projects on different types of platforms. I chose to use Nearpod and Slidebean. Within these two assignments, I find the pillar from the education department that says, "Our graduates are creative and integrative educators" fitting towards my attitude as a future educator.
   The main idea for both of them was for us to reflect on our teaching styles and how we will will implement them in our future classrooms.  Both of these projects also challenged us to think about  how we will assist our future students in order to help them succeed. There was also some overlap in both of the projects. In both project we had to think of some ways to implement different ideas into our future classrooms. In the literacy project we had to include ideas of how to integrate different literacies into the classroom and in the curriculum project we had to think of ways to incorporate main themes from our curriculum philosophies into our future units and lessons. These projects really made me broaden my view of teaching and how important literacy and planning curriculum can be in math classes.
   These presentations also linked closely to the pillar of the education department about being, "creative and integrative educators". This statement focuses on using different types of technology while being creative and intriguing with lessons. This was demonstrated through these projects because I worked with new software and presented my projects with them. This helped me try new technologies and makes me want to find some new ways to integrate them into my classroom. This pillar also mentions how educators will understand the, "connection between intellectual and emotional-social growth, they help their students gain self- knowledge and assume responsibility for their own learning".  I find that this ties closely into my curriculum philosophy of humanism and progressivism. They both focus on students own individual beings and humanism focused more on the emotional- social growth of the student.  These ideas are greatly tied into my views on education and how I want to be able to conduct my future classrooms.
   While working on these two projects, I used Slidebean and Nearpod as my presentation platforms. These both created an additional challenge for me since I had to learn how to navigate two new tools. I found that both website were pretty easy to use once you got the hang of them. I had a incident with Nearpod where I created a text slide and I tried to drag and drop a picture into the slide and all of the text disappeared and there was no undo button. This was frustrating in the moment, but I learned that it is important to save my work somewhere else before hand in case of a accident like that again. Overall, I liked both apps but I think I would choose Nearpod over Slidebean since it would be more interactive and hands on for students. I also want to try out some more presentation software like Adobe Spark Page or Keynote to see what they are like. For the future, I am going to try more apps/ websites to see how they work in the classroom to get a feel of what I think would be the best fit for a math classroom. I can only try to find something through trial and error, so working on different projects with different platforms will give me a good overall feeling for many different tools.
   I personally enjoyed working on both of these projects. They helped give me a good insight of who I want to be as a teacher and appreciate what my past teachers have done for me and the extra mile they take within each lesson plan or unit they make so they could help accommodate every student. In my curriculum project, there are two pictures of people who inspire me to be an educator. One picture is on my high school pre-calculus and calculus teacher, Mrs. Raftery. She inspired me to be a teacher and helped me find my love for mathematics. She is a teacher who fully embraces education and wants the best possible outcomes for all of her students. The other picture is of my two nephews. They inspire me to be the best educator I can be and help form a good curriculum and education so that they will be well rounded global citizens. These projects and people have all opened my eyes to how impactful and amazing being an educator is and I cannot wait to implement these ideas into my future classrooms