Response to Kathy Schrock

I was recently introduced to Kathy Schrock’s blog http://blog.kathyschrock.net/ by Barrie Roberts on Twitter http://twitter.com/bardenblade/.

Kathy’s 30^th March post presents her ideas for applying Google tools to Blooms Taxonomy and showed us this picture http://kathyschrock.net/googleblooms/. The image is a wonderful piece of work and joins a creditable canon of other attempts to capture educational theory within a social media context.

I’m prompted to respond because for once, the image seems to recognise the fact that different levels of Blooms technology can be addressed by almost ANY technology – as it is not necessarily the technology that counts, but the way in which the technology is employed.

In many of my workshops I provide a quick and dirty reminder of Bloom’s and the Revised Taxonomies. I do this to show the participants (usually teachers of one kind or another) that even mobile phones used for texting can address different levels of the taxonomy. I then ask them to recognise the ways in which various Web 2.0 sites can be used and require the participants to place (velcro’d) Web 2.0 logos (onto model pyramids I have made for the task*) according to how they (the participants) feel the site could be used.

Invariably, tools like YouTube are seen as lower order thinking skills (remembering, understanding and applying – LOTS) and some blogging tools are seen as HOTS (higher order thinking skills).

I firmly believe that each tool we use could/can be applied at the higher levels of Bloom’s.

It is the skills of the teacher/tutor/lecturer – whoever, to ensure that the learner’s task requires THEM – the learner, to work at that higher level. Hence (and you will see this on Kathy’s blog picture) YouTube can be used at the top – Creation level. It can also be used at the Remembering level – hence my own filleting fish video, used by learners to simply remember/understand how to do the task before ‘applying’ it.

Thank you Kathy.

*The pyramids have three faces and I use each face for a different task. They are made of a pressed polystyrene and can be assembled out of my suitcase (I am a peripatetic trainer).

Some previous Theory posts

• http://eduvel.wordpress.com/2009/05/26/theories-of-learning-need-and-motivation/
• http://eduvel.wordpress.com/2010/02/18/blooms/
• http://eduvel.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/gloucestershire/
• http://eduvel.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/experiential-learning/
• http://eduvel.wordpress.com/2010/02/27/kath-eh-gay-oh-my/

 

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