The highlight of the conference for me was listening to (Sheppard) talk about how numeracy and literacy skills can be taught in correlation to other subjects such as Math and English. Very good examples were taken from the state examinations of how questions in Math can be very similar to exam questions of Technical subjects. Reference to this is made in the new discover graphics book which was also on show in the creation and innovative conference. I also learned from (Sheppard) the theoretical application of both cos and tan, which are most commonly used in math. It was pointed out that most people can indeed identify both cos and tan on the calculator but won’t be able to explain further how they are practically applied.

I was delighted to see some collaborative work brought into the conference by Patricia O Regan, who got us working with our table members. I thought this worked very well as there was a mix in every table between different year groups, tutors and passed students. I found the group work very helpful in gathering a further understanding of literacy and numeracy along with noticing what everyone else’s understanding was of these key skills. “we can learn more efficiently when bouncing our ideas off one another” (Maye 2020).

The creative and innovative ideas I found interesting from the fourth years was the use of google classroom. This idea was presented by Diarmuid McNulty. I wasn’t sure of how google classroom worked but found I had a good idea of how to create a google classroom after the conference. It was explained that a code that will be generated by the creator could be shared to students for them to join.