The initial blogging strangeness has worn off. Now that I know what a blog is, I find myself reading blogs all over the cyberworld; I had no idea that so many education colleagues use blogs. Until last week, my worldview of bloggers was limited to the 2009 film "Julia and Julia" (a light-hearted comedy I do recommend) where one of the protagonists blogs her way through Julia Child's cookbook. My assumption was that blogging was for writers or would-be writers or would-be something else, but it did not occur to me that blogging could be used as a learning tool or that I would be seriously considering the blog in my own teaching.
Indeed, my own teaching has taken so many turns over my career. During this week's readings I am constantly reminded of my humble beginnings - and the teacher education courses taken so long ago - pretty much forgotten these years in Tunisia. Writing behavioral objectives is not new, but as a skill it is rusty, and the ABCD model I had never seen before. But the article "Bloom's Taxonomy Blooms Digitally" by Andrew Churches URL:thhp://www.techlearning.com/article/8670 brought back all the terminology with a very fascinating look at the new elements of 21st century learning: new digital verbs! I must admit that many of these verbs are still theoretical to me e.g. twittering, mashing, wiki-ing. I really appreciated this revised taxonomy map and the article definitely gave me some food for thought. It's bookmarked.
:)
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Hello Ellen,
ReplyDeleteI was also attracted by Bloom's Taxonomy and I believe it's a useful guide to set up behavioral objectives.
I also was wondering if we could plan our lessons in a hierarchical way as in Bloom's Taxonomy? In other words, can we for example design an activity for a single lesson which starts with Remembering then goes through Understanding, Applying, Analyzing, Evaluating, until it arrives at Creating by the end of the lesson? This would be meaningful process to follow, isn't it? It's like giving information to students chunk by chunk.
Yours,
Mohamed
Hey Mohamed,
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely! While some lessons may stay at the lower cognitive levels, I would certainly hope that many lessons move the students all the way up the map to the evaluating and creating levels. Our problem perhaps as teachers is that we only assume that the higher levels are being reached, or that we expect them to reach a higher level without specifically preparing them to "move up the ladder." When we purposefully write our objectives to consider and include several levels, we can perhaps see where the students get stuck and thus design the lesson accordingly.
Yours for better teaching,
Ellen