Bloom's Digital Taxonomy

The Bloom's Digital Taxonomy article was a new way of looking at and thinking about the "original" Bloom's Taxonomy taking into consideration the digital tools and technologies that must be incorporated into today's classroom in order to help students achieve, recall, understand, apply, analyze, and evaluate what they learn, and create products. The information in this article was helpful because, as I was reading page 7 of the article, I noticed most of what our students do with technology when left to their own devices is located on the lower end of the scale (LOTS - remembering and understanding): texting, instant messaging, twittering, e-mailing, and chatting. The article served as a reminder that it is our duty as teachers to assist students in "climbing" this heirarchy of skills (moving upward to the HOTS - applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating) by assigning appropriate tasks and projects. There was a definite focus in the article on students as collaborative learners in Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. Our students are already using some of the collaborative tools such as Moodle and GoogleDocs mentioned in the article for assignments and projects, but are they using them to achieve HOTS? Collaboration should facilitate the achievement of HOTS, but can only do so through carefully structured projects and assignments.

In Astronomy class, students prepare an article summary every quarter. They choose a recent article from a scientific or astronomy journal regarding a subject or topic in astronomy that they are interested in and summarize the article for the other class members. Students *may* include posters or PowerPoint slides to their presentation if they wish although it is currently not required. Perhaps requiring a PowerPoint presentation to go along with their verbal summary of the article would encourage HOTS (specifically analyzing, evaluating, and creating). They would have to be judicious about what images they include in their presentation to concisely convey information. A maximum presentation length (number of slides) as well as a review of website evaluation (choosing images) would assist students in the steps of analyzing and evaluating. A review of appropriate design parameters would assist them in the creation of the presentation. With these changes in the requirements of the project, students would certainly learn more than if they were simply to recite the article to their classmates.

As I read the Bloom's Taxonomy article I kept thinking about how the school district's research scope and sequence fits into/with this taxonomy. Students do Boolean searches to gather information about their topics, prepare website evaluations of potential sources, write, edit, rewrite, in some cases collaborate and provide feedback to peers as they write and ultimately create a project or paper, hopefully enhancing their learning experience and relating their project to classroom work. I know this is what we aim to do with the Bioethics paper in Biology. Students are certainly asked to step out of their comfort zone in terms of topics as well. They must learn about what ethics *is* then apply what they know about ethics in general to a specific topic, then discuss both (or all) sides of the issue in the paper they create. Perhaps to add to this experience students could post their drafts of their papers online (Googeldocs?)inviting a select number of classmates to constructively review and comment on their work. Students would be required to review and comment on a specific number of peers' work. Some of the rubrics provided in the Bloom's Digital Taxonomy article could be used or amended to provide a tool with which to grade students' feedback to their peers. I will have to ask Mary H. if this is a viable addition to the project.

I was amazed to see in the article the vast number of digital collaborative tools available to teachers and students. I was happy to see the addition of rubrics associated with these tools as well. Coming up with a rubric from scratch could perhaps deter a teacher from using any one of these tools. It is a mind-numbing thought to try to think of ways to incorporate all or most of these tools into the curriculum. Instead, I should choose a select few (Moodle, Skype, Googledocs) to incorporate. Baby steps, right?

As a side note, the spelling, grammar, and puncuation errors in the article were a bit distracting for me. (How about some of you English teachers??) I thought it was amusing that the author made these errors even as he prepared a rubric which deducted points from the tudents' grade for the same errors. Someone, please, get this chap a good editor! :)