HOTS for Bloom's, part 3

The two previous posts 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. The two posts also highlighted some tech-enhanced activities. In this post, I will be providing literacy ideas, using iOS apps and tools, for targeting the higher-order thinking skills on Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy- applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating.

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App Smashing and Literacy Activities

One of the neat things about having apps and tools that can each do something different, is the ability to “smash” the apps. App-smashing is creating an asset in one app, another asset in another app, and combining them, usually in a third app, to create a new and exciting result! JoAnn Fox has created a great overview of app-smashing with iPad apps. Watch this great video!

There are tons of ideas for using reading and writing activities to extend thinking to move students to the higher order thinking skills levels of Bloom’s. Let’s take a look at a few of these and a app smash of apps that can work together to complete the task. These literacy strategies were chosen and app-smashed from Karen Tankersley’s book, The Threads of Reading: Strategies for Literacy Development.

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Letters from the Heart Activity

Ask students to write a letter about some facet of a book. The letter can be addressed to the author, a historical figure, or a character in the book, and can be written either from the student’s perspective or from that of another character. Coach the students ahead of time with what this looks and feels like so they are using the higher levels of Blooms.

Have students write the letter using a word processor, create a drawing in a drawing program and, with a screen recording program or photo/audio app, bring in the image and make an audio recording of the letter.

One extension activity for the “letters from the heart” activity is for each student to take the role of the letter writer AND the recipient and conduct a post-letter conversation about the content of the letter.

The most fun app, no matter what the age of the students, for conducting this conversation is Sock Puppets. Sock Puppets allows each speaker to have their turn in the conversation. The free app keeps the length to 30 seconds— which makes students really consider what they are going to say. The paid version allows 90 second recordings. Because of the changeability of the voice pitches, one student can easily conduct both sides of the conversation and it sounds as if two people are talking!

Wish You Were Here Postcard Activity

After reading a nonfiction book, ask students to become a character and “put” themselves in the time period, the event, or the location. They will need to conduct additional research about the time period, event, or location and gather a Creative Commons-licensed image. Next, have them write a “Wish You Were Here” postcard to their friend.

Current Postcards is an fun app to complete this assignment. (It is listed under the iPhone apps so look for it there.) Current Postcards makes it easy to bring in an image, write the postcard, and email it or screenshot it for sharing

Another twist on this activity is for students to use the same image and a green screen recording tool to make a video of themselves talking about their “wish you were here” event. You will need to get a green screen, but here is video instructing you how to pick up a green sheet at the store and make your own! The DoInk Green Screen app can be used to create a green-screen video .

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Key Question Charts Activity

With Key Question charts, you provide students with a controversial question, such as “Do curfews keep teens out of trouble?”  or ” Do we have a throw-away society?” Have students locate or provide them with links “pro” and “con” articles to read about the topic Have students create a chart that lists the pro argument on one side and the con argument on the other.  Then ask the students to form an opinion of their own after carefully evaluating the data and to provide their reasoning strategies.

The T-Charts, Pro and Cons app is perfect for this activity and  the finished chart can be screenshot to save to the camera roll or emailed.

Another way to do this is to put the students into groups to work collaboratively on a pro/con concept map. WeMap is a synchronous, collaborative concept- and mind-mapper for iOS and Android. Students can work together and add their justifications right in the app.

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Drawing Inferences Activity

Provide students with comic strips or political cartoons that require them to infer what the cartoonist meant. Ask students to work with a partner or in a small group to identify what inferences they need to make to interpret the point of the cartoon, and what how they connected those inferences to things they have already learned.

Students can easily use the mobile Web browser and Padlet to upload their cartoon as the background of the Padlet and have the discussion by leaving notes in that venue.

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Point of View Activity

Using point of view to teach inference can be fun for students. You can read a book or show a movie with a “different” point of view

One book/movie often used for this purpose, for students of any age, is the “True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka.

Here is an overview of the lesson. First, watch the video below.

Next, turn to your neighbor and discuss questions like:

• What is different about how this story of the three little pigs begins?
• What do we find out about the wolf?
• Why did the author tell the story from the wolf’s point of view?
• Which version of the story do you think is the correct one? Why?

The Scholastic site offers additional ideas on how to use this story.

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There are many apps that can be used to create a product and app-smash. However, there is also something to be said about becoming comfortable with one multi-purpose tool and designing assessments to have students concentrate more on the content than learning bunches of new tools. The Explain Everything app is the “Swiss army knife” of apps and is available for both iOS and Android platforms for $2.99 (and less through volume purchasing programs).

Using this single app, students can:

• Draw
• Type
• Import images and/or videos
• Take photos and videos
• Animate objects
• Create multiple pages
• Record audio while drawing
• Do a picture-in-picture video with the front camera
• Export in many file types like MP4, PDF, JPEG, and as an Explain Everything file
• Save to many places, including the camera roll, iTuens, Evernote, Google Drive, WebDAV, Box, OneDrive, Vimeo, and more

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I have concentrated mostly on iOS apps in this “HOTS for Bloom’s” series. Of course, there are Android, Chrome, Windows, and online Web tools that can be used for these activities, too. Here are some support pages to supply you with ideas and apps.

• Creating with Online Tools is a categorized list of both Web 2.o and Chrome apps.
• Bloomin’ Apps provides you with some ideas for apps to use at each level of Bloom’s for all platforms.
• Digital Storytelling includes lists of iOS, Android, and Web 2.o tools for planning, producing, and hosting student projects.
• Creating with the iPad includes additional iOS apps for video creation, storyboarding, animated, charting, and much more

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!