HOTS for Bloom's, part 2

The previous post in this three-part series provided some background in how to recognize and teach critical thinking skills and, using Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy as a guide, embed the higher-order thinking skills into teaching and learning. This time and in part three,  I will provide some activities and the iOS apps and tools to support them!

ACTIVITIES

Susan Brooks-Young, in an article in THE Journal, takes a look at some ideas using technology to encourage higher-order thinking skills. Let’s look at a few of these and a few that I have developed.

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Activity 1: One Minute Video Summary

One fun activity is for students to create is a one-minute video summary of a book being studied or a video watched in class. In small groups, students analyze the item, evaluate what important information must be incorporated into the one minute summary, and create a video in one take.

Each student will have access to a Padlet page, an online backchannel tool,  to to brainstorm the aspects of the film or book they want to include and then organize the notes after evaluating what is important to include in the final video.

Once the storyboard is finished, students need to develop a script. They can do that with a shared Google Doc or locally on the mobile device with Pages or Word.

The students can use any iOS video app to shoot the video. I am partial to iMovie since students can shoot the video live right in the app .

You can view a sample of this type of activity, which is a one-minute summary of the movie Forrest Gump, here.

A related summarizing activity might be creating a comic strip from the book or movie’s main points. This can easily be done with a drawing tool app. There are tons of drawing apps available, but one that has easy to use tools is SketchBook Express for the iPad from Autodesk. It has tons of brush tips for students to use, up to three layers, easy-to-move drawn items, a 2500% pinch-to-zoom, and the ability to come back and work on the creation later and save the final product to the camera roll.

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Activity 2: Infographics

Infographics are a great way to have students work on the higher order thinking skills.  Anders Ross offers my favorite definition of an infographic.

“Information graphics or infographics are visual representations of information, data or knowledge. These graphics are used where complex information needs to be explained quickly and clearly, such as in signs, maps, journalism, technical writing, and education.”

The process of creating an infographic has a few components. The first is having students become familiar with visualizations so they have some idea of what is possible when thinking about how they are going to represent data. You can have them analyze scenarios about how they might use the various visualizations. 

Students need to manipulate any numerical data they have collected and create graphs, which get saved to the camera roll as images. These can be from Numbers or Excel for the iPad. Another app to start students thinking about visualizations is Easy Chart. (figure 5) If the data is already compiled, EasyChart allows the student to create bar, line and pie/sidebar charts and think about which type is the “best” type to represent the information.

For the final creation of the infographic, if the student has Keynote or Powerpoint for the iPad, either one can make a serviceable infographic. There are also apps for the iPad that are specifically developed for the creation of infographics including easel.ly, GlogsterEDU (figure 6), and Canva.

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Activity 3: Five Photo Stories

Five photo have students telling a story with five images and no text or audio. There is a group on Flickr for Educators to provide guidelines and showcase examples of these. Here is a sample from Flickr titled “Worm Attack”. The guidelines for students to think about are to:

• Establish character and setting
• Create a situation with multiple actions
• Engage the character in the situation
• Build toward a likely outcome
• End with a surprising – but logical – finish

One of the iPad apps that would help create self-running movie of these photo stories is Pixntell. The app allows for 5 images for no cost, although there is a watermark in the free version. You simply bring in the photos or take them within the app, edit or rearrange them, record no audio, and a movie is created.

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In part three of this series, I will provide you with some app-smashing and literacy ideas to encourage students to think!

HOTS for Bloom's, part 1

Creating activities that enhance student higher-order thinking skills is important. It requires some thought about ways to develop critical thinkers in the classroom as well as using mobile tools and apps to help students learn how to think.  There are may definitions and explanations of “critical thinking” — a term which began to be used in the mid twentieth century. I feel this overview of a well-cultivated critical thinker created by Paul and Elder sums it up nicely.

A well-cultivated critical thinker…

• raises vital questions and problems, formulating them clearly and precisely
• gathers and assesses relevant information, using abstract ideas to interpret it
• comes to well-reasoned conclusions and solutions, testing them against relevant criteria
• thinks open-mindedly within alternative systems of thought, assessing their preconceived assumptions
• communicates effectively with others in figuring out solutions to complex problems

Source: Richard Paul and Linda Elder, The Miniature Guide to Critical Thinking Concepts and Tools, Foundation for Critical Thinking Press, 2008.

Students also need to practice how to think. Figure 1 showcases some strategies from Reading Rockets that can help you provide this practice!

BLOOM’S TAXONOMY

I am sure you are all familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy. On the left in Figure 2 is the original Bloom’s Taxonomy, developed in the late 50’s by Benjamin Bloom. And, on the right, is the Revised Blooms Taxonomy, developed in 2000 by Anderson, a student of Bloom’s, and Krathwohl. (Just a reminder that “synthesis” is the same as “creating” in case you find materials that are mapped to the original Bloom’s Taxonomy.

However, I never thought about Bloom’s as a triangle. I thought about these levels as representing the cognitive thought processes we all go through when acquiring new knowledge, as we move back and forth among the levels, I developed my own image (Figure 3)  to show these cognitive levels are interlocking and all make up parts of the whole.

Although this post is about the higher order thinking skills in the analyzing, evaluating, and creating domains of Bloom’s, with perhaps some at the applying level, too, (Figure 4),  I also want to review the six levels of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy.

Diane Darrow has done an excellent job of providing an overview of the levels of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy in series of Edutopia articles. Apps can be used to target more than one cognitive level, but this overview explains some of the ways they can support each level.

Remembering: Remembering involves finding information, storing it, and then recalling it. Apps for the remembering level improve the user’s ability to define terms, identify facts, and recall and locate information. In remembering students recall, bookmark, list, search, create mind maps, and write.

Understanding: The understanding level contains skills that have students explaining and constructing meaning using various methods. Apps for the understanding level,  help the student demonstrate the ability to identify the main idea, generalize new material, translate verbal content into a visual form, or make predictions. In understanding students will explain, blog, subscribe, categorize, annotate, and tweet.

Applying: The applying level has students using learned material through products to showcase acquisition of knowledge. Apps that fit into the applying stage provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their ability to implement learned procedures and methods, and  highlight the ability to apply concepts in unfamiliar circumstances.  In applying, students illustrate, present, demonstrate, and simulate

Analyzing: Analyzing includes breaking information into parts to explore understandings and relationships. Apps that fit into the “analyzing” stage improve the user’s ability to differentiate between the relevant and irrelevant, determine relationships, and recognize the organization of content.  In analyzing, students complete tasks that involves structuring, surveying, outlining, and organizing.

Evaluating: The evaluating stage has students making decisions about the value of content based on criteria set by themselves or external sources.  Apps at this stage help students judge content reliability and accuracy quality and effectiveness,  and help them reach informed decisions. In evaluating students show their understanding of a topic or participate in evaluating a peer’s understanding of a topic.

Creating: The creating level helps students reorganize acquired knowledge and information to create a new end result. Apps at the creating level provides opportunities for students to generate ideas, design plans, and come up with a new way of doing things. In creating, students create projects that involve video editing, storytelling, video casting, podcasting, and animating.

If you are interested in exploring the levels of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy in more depth, I presented a series of webinars in 2012 on each level and you can study these one hour sessions if you wish!

1. Remembering
2. Understanding
3. Applying
4. Analyzing
5. Evaluating
6. Creating

Another great source that can help you develop activities and assessments to support the HOTS is this edited chart (Figure 5) from Clemson University which provides various action verbs at each level of Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy.

NEXT TIME

In an article in THE Journal, Susan Brooks-Young  outlines five tech-friendly lessons to encourage higher order thinking skills in students. During part 2 of this 3-part series, I will go over some of these and some ideas of my own that include iOS apps and tools!

Google Tools and Bloom's Revised Taxonomy

Facts.

1. Leslie Owen Wilson provides a good overview of Anderson and Krathwol revised Bloom's Taxonomy which was updated in 2000.
2. Andrew Churches developed a model, called Bloom's Digital Taxonomy, to highlight the use of tools and technologies at each level to facilitate learning.
3. Alex Ambrose (2009) created a site dedicated to his idea of Googlios, the use of Google tools to support the creation of student ePortfolios to enhance their personal learning environment.

After looking through the wealth of information offered by Andrew and Alex, and having already developed my own version of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy with my favorite Web 2.0 tools for students to use at each cognitive level, I decided to combine the two-- a Bloom's Digital Taxonomy using ONLY the suite of tools offered by Google.

Boy, was I surprised! Even as a Google Certified Teacher, there were so many cool new tools that I did not know about! Google has purchased some already created, and there are some neat ones in Google Labs, which, hopefully, will "graduate" soon and become part of the core group of Google Tools.

I explored 51 Google tools as I figured out how they met Andrew's criteria for each level of the Bloom's Digital Taxonomy. I justified their use, and some appear in all levels, some in various, and some only in a single level. In my presentation about "Connecting Your Classroom to the Future", I am redoing the section which highlights Web 2.0 tools and highlighting instead the "less-mainstream" Google tools.

I developed a clickable graphic to allow educators to make their own judgments on how the tools can be used to support student learning at each level. I know you creative educators will come up with great ideas to for their use. (Hum, I think I will add a Google form to that page to allow educators to contribute their ideas, too!) The screenshot of the very busy graphic is below, and you can find the information and clickable graphic at this URL: http://kathyschrock.net/googleblooms/

http://kathyschrock.net/googleblooms/

 Let me know via email or comments or Twitter what you think of it!