Through the course of making my presentations and watching others, I realized that literacy and curriculum are tightly connected. Creating a curriculum is the act of taking the big overarching questions of the unit and breaking them down into manageable and measurable goals that students can achieve. In my presentation, I discussed my curriculum orientation, which is the lens through which I view education. Discovering my personal teaching philosophies is important to do early on because it will continue to influence the parts of curriculum I choose to focus on. Literacy is more about the how. How am I going to present information to students in a way that is interesting, engaging, and differentiated? I can take the goals and objectives from the curriculum and go even further into detail by considering how I hope to effectively communicate ideas in a particular lesson. This includes both what specific mediums I will use (i.e. textbooks, YouTube videos, field trips, social media, etc.) and how I plan on connecting the content to the real world in a way that makes sense. I would say that literacy and curriculum are not really separate subjects, but more different sides of the same coin.
Connections to the mission statement. For both presentations, I was able to take information that was already interesting to me and create a presentation that I hoped would be engaging for my fellow classmates. In my curriculum presentation, I explored theorists that were famous for their ideas about humanism and constructivism in order to reflect on how their understandings about education line up with my own. I chose two whose words really resonated with me to discuss in the presentation. This type of work always piques my curiosity because has so much to do with who I am as a person. It reminded me that as a teacher, the more I can get my content to connect with students on a personal level, the more I can get them to engage with the lessons. I also got to practice reflecting on my curriculum orientation, which I am certain will be a perpetual journey as I continue to learn and grow. In my literacy presentation, I was able to consider the ways that I could put some of my ideas into practice through different mediums of conveying information. I reflected on how important it was to remember that I will be teaching to students of all different levels of media and technological literacy - some students may have their own iPhones and laptops while others may not even have a computer at home to use for homework. I thought about how to best relate my content to my students daily lives in a way that they would find stimulating. Additionally, by sharing our presentations in groups, we as a class were all able to benefit from each others perspectives.
I used Slidebean for my curriculum presentation and Nearpod for my literacy presentation. I had never used either before and so I decided to try them both out. Both had positive and negative aspects. Slidebean was great because it was simple and easy. It took little work to make the presentation look nice. The downside is that because it is so easy and simple, it is not very customizable. It also costs money eventually. Nearpod is great because it is free, it is fairly simple, and it is very interactive. It is really nice being able to project the slides onto everyones personal devices. Honestly, it took some of the pressure off of presenting because everyone was looking at their computers instead of at me and I could look at the slides on my iPad so I did not need to remember as much. I am not sure if that is a positive or negative thing. Again, it is a fairly simple tool so still not too customizable, but more so than Slidebean. Both presentations went fine, so no complaints there, but I am going to keep experimenting with different tools because I have yet to find my ideal presentation software. Right now Nearpod will be my go to if I need to make an interactive presentation quickly.
As far as my personal ideas about literacy and curriculum go, they have changed since the beginning of class and I am sure that they will continue to throughout my career as an educator. I know that in the last two weeks I went from thinking that literacy was just about reading and writing to thinking that literacy is the ability to use tools to understand others and express oneself as efficiently as possible. In curriculum, I want to find the balance between giving students as much freedom for self-directed learning as possible and also pushing them to try things that are outside their comfort zone and that they may not necessarily like at first. The more time I spend in real classrooms, the more I will be able to see what works and what does not. One thing that I would really like to get in the habit of doing is keeping a journal of sorts (maybe this blog?) where I regularly write down my thoughts. That way I have a physical log where I can see how my thinking has changed over time. Sometimes it can be easy to trick myself into thinking that the way I feel now something is the way I have always felt, which is almost never true.
