Tools and processes
I see this a lot.
(click for larger version)
I appreciate the sentiment here. It’s an educator trying to share some tools in an organised way with some other educators. But mapping them against Bloom’s Taxonomy. Really?
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification of learning objectives within education proposed in 1956 by a committee of educators chaired by Benjamin Bloom.
[…]
It refers to a classification of the different objectives that educators set for students (learning objectives). Bloom’s Taxonomy divides educational objectives into three “domains”: Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor (sometimes loosely described as knowing/head, feeling/heart and doing/hands respectively). Within the domains, learning at the higher levels is dependent on having attained prerequisite knowledge and skills at lower levels.
(Wikipedia, accessed 21 February 2012)
Why is Flickr under Remembering when it can be used for mashups under a Creative Commons license? Surely VoiceThread can be used as much for Evaluating as Creating? How does Google Earth, in and of itself, promote Analysing?
Tools, by themselves, rarely develop higher-order thinking skills. It’s all about the processes around them and the context in which they’re used.
I’ve seen lessons and lectures that were captivating and really pushed students forward using no more than a blackboard and a piece of chalk. Similarly, I’ve seen some that used almost every conceivable piece of technology under the sun and students made little or no progress.
So educators, if you’re going to use a specific framework to present some tools or some ideas, please make sure that you understand the nature of that framework.
Image CC BY-ND Samantha Penney
