This desktop app will help make lives easier and build community and classroom connections.
The cultural calendar will be represented with a circular calendar where users have access to the most popular holidays in the world. It will be a desktop app with email notification features. Users can filter by month, country, culture, religion, or name of the holiday.
With a paid account, teachers can save the cultures of their classrooms and receive notifications for upcoming holidays that apply to their classrooms.
It will be customizable so it can be a notification on the day with books, videos, activities, and the names of the students who celebrate these holidays or you can be notified ahead of time to help prepare. It is up to the educator to decide what works for them.
The community forum will be used for educators to share their experiences and the developers will use this feedback to make adjustments to the platform. This is a way to demonstrate that all classrooms can benefit from cultural inclusion and to see how other classrooms are welcoming diversity.
A use case for a tool like this would be a Kindergarten teacher in Montreal who had a classroom of 25 students. In that classroom, there were 12 first languages that were not English and students were connected to many different countries and cultures. In the classroom, we had students from Canada, France, Brazil, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Iran, China, Japan, Korea, Spain, Armenia, Ukraine, and Denmark. Many of them could speak English but there were 8 students who had no English exposure before arriving in Montreal for that school year.
The teacher was passionate about bringing their cultures into the classroom and invited parents to come in to teach the students about the different holidays and how they were celebrated in their families. This teacher saw that when some of those students who would never speak up in class were able to present their holidays and invite their friends into their realities, they found confidence and seemed to connect with their classmates more.
This tool links people, cultures, and understanding because if something is taught, it is valued and important. A tool like this would make it easier for more teachers to connect their students through understanding.