Bloom´s Taxonomy for Digital Learning
Bloom´s taxonomy gives teachers one distinctive advantage, it makes us think and rethink about our online teaching and learning. It is an evaluative process and with the rise of online learning, which I am now just getting into, it presents a fascinating challenge and opportunity to rethink how students learn. The question is, ´How does Bloom´s Taxonomy fit into our online teaching and learning?´
Firstly, what is Blooms taxonomy? It is simply a way to help us think about how learning happens. It is not an exact science but its premise is that there are levels to learning.
Here is a diagram.
So from the diagram you can see that it is ordered from higher order to lower order thinking skills. This revamped Bloom´s taxonomy includes verbs to help both teachers and student to target these skills. So for example if you are just testing a student´s knowledge then you might be using words like describe this or can you recognize... These types of questions in themselves are not problematic but they are not challenging a student enough. As teacher´s we need to try to move up the taxonomy to analysis and eventually evaluation.
In our lessons, we specifically need to make an effort to make sure that we target the analysis and evaluation of the lesson material. It could be as direct as explaining why a word should be used in this context rather than another and what effect that might have on the reader or it could be more abstract, like how is a character is morally ambiguous.
Using the higher ordered thinking skills makes the lesson more engaging and memorable for the student and teacher, but more importantly; it provides an opportunity to explore the topic you are reading, writing, listening and speaking about. Digital learning still provides teachers an avenue to this exploration we just have to find inventive ways to provide that learning opportunity.
12 mars 2019
