Thursday, November 11, 2010

Bloom's Digital Taxonomy

Although I have learned about Bloom’s Taxonomy before in an education class, I have to admit that this conceptual framework was very helpful to me.  I have learned about the original Bloom’s Taxonomy that included: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.  Honestly, after reading this material, I actually like Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy better.  Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating) seems easier to comprehend.  Both taxonomies technically aim for the same goal (understanding the lower order thinking skills before you can understand higher order thinking skills).  This reading does a great job of explaining the key terms and giving many examples of the possible activities that can be used in describing the concepts.  I feel that Bloom’s Taxonomy is a resource that we definitely need to follow as teachers.  We cannot expect our students to analyze a story or apply a math concept if they don’t have the knowledge (or remembering) of the concept being learned.  Bloom’s Taxonomy is the step-ladder that is to be followed.  Students must remember, understand apply, analyze, and evaluate before they are able to create.  If they cannot master the lower order thinking skills, then there is no way they are able to master the higher order thinking skills.  As a teacher, it will be my job to make sure that my students understand the concept I am presenting before I expect them to do anything with that concept.  Until this class, I never realized how many useful technologies can be used not only in a math class, but for any class.  Even now, I can find some activity that incorporates technology for each area of Bloom's Taxonomy.

3 comments:

  1. I agree that this is a really useful tool, although sometimes I find that--without concrete examples--the terminology can go in one ear and out the other.

    Also, sometimes the lines between thinking skills seem a little blurry to me. This doesn't necessarily have to be a bad thing, though. More often than not our students will be navigating within more than one category at once. As long as we recognize this I feel that we will be able to deal with the complexities inherent in a framework like this.

    To this end, I agree with your comment that the taxonomies offer a ladder, with the lower order skills being mastered before the higher ones can. Also, though, we must keep in my mind that students can be using several thinking skills at once.

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  2. Hi Megan

    Glad you find Bloom's Digital taxonomy useful, it is a ladder, but its not one you need to start on the bottom rung. In fact its often better to start with a higher order entry point, that then challenges the students to discover the lower order aspects as part of analysing, evaluating or creating.
    take for example a student presented with an inflamatory news paper article. A recent one was the mother of four who was fined $1.5 million for 24 counts of piracy - http://www.nzherald.co.nz/technology/news/article.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10686247 - to analyse and evaluate this article one must first understand the background - what is piracy, Who does it? When and where does it happen? How does it happen? Why does it happen? Then evaluate it asking about its importance, relationships, effectiveness and impact. As a teacher you don't have to teach the lower order elements, rather just scaffold the learning so the students do this as part of the process.
    And consider the technology they use to research this. Advanced searches, boolean searches, Mind mapping tools to brainstorm. Online tools like Bibme to develop suitable bibliographies. potentially they could present it as a report or a presentation - powerpoint, keynote or voicethread?

    Cheers

    Andrew

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  3. OMG! Andrew Churches responded to your post, Megan! How cool is that!

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