For the competency “Demonstrate ability to read and understand educational literature related to discipline,” I have chosen my “Annotated Bibliography” from EDCI 52002 as an artifact. This paper allowed me to research articles on textbook writing. These articles gave me valuable information on the process and politics of developing and writing a textbook. While I know there would be some rewrites, these articles showed me that creating a textbook could take years. These articles also brought about key points of contracts and partnerships that one may not realize that could also impact the timing and ease of writing a curriculum. As a teacher, who wants to pursue a career in textbook writing, I think this article helped take my understanding of writing content to understanding how that plays into working with others on the development team and how to get the book to be published. This artifact works well for this competency because the goal was to read academic articles and apply concepts to a future use which I did for textbook writing.

 

For the competency “Demonstrate ability to describe fundamental theories of human learning,” I have chosen my final paper on “Learning Theories” from EDCI 531 as an artifact. For this paper, I researched five different learning processes or theories. I used this information to create an information document for teachers to use for their classes. I gave a brief description of each theory, those who contributed to each theory, and classroom applications for teachers to use in their classrooms. This was intended to be a quick guide that teachers can use if they need fresh ideas or need to do some research and this would give them a start to guide their research. As a teacher, we do not always have a lot of time to start a full research project on theories and methods to help a struggling student, but this guide allowed me to put information together that I would like to have as a quick reference to help direct any further research that I may need to do, and I assumed other teachers would want the same. This artifact demonstrates this competency because it looks at five common learning theories that are used in multiple classrooms and gives examples of what those theories would look like being applied in the classroom. There is always more room to add more theories to this artifact in the future as I have time to do more research and discover that I want to learn more to help a particular student in class.

 

For the competency “Apply knowledge of human learning, diversity, and effective pedagogy to the solution of problems in your discipline,” I have chosen my “Technology Integration project” from EDCI 564 as an artifact. In this project, I took a chapter from my precalculus textbook. I developed a detailed lesson plan implementing the four levels of SAMR (substitution, augmentation, modification, and redefinition) technology to my original lesson plan provided by the textbook author. The chapter is divided into seven sections, and I implemented an online quiz, Desmos (app or online) graphing calculator, You-Tube videos, and an interactive web page. These all help to transform my lesson plans and should provide a more applicable experience for my students when we reach that chapter in class. I have taught precalculus at a previous school that used a different curriculum, but this is my first time teaching this curriculum to students. This project was good to refresh my trigonometry skills and update them with new activities and assignments that would be more beneficial to students now where most jobs are done on computers. This artifact works well by taking the prior knowledge of precalculus and modernizing its presentation by implementing technology into the lessons instead of forcing students to do all the work by hand.