Revised Blooms’: A technology-based hierarchy

Back in February, Mike Fisher posted on his blog a technology-based hierarchy for the revised Bloom’s taxonomy.

There was some discussion about the application (or misapplication) of Blooms with this hierarchy. Here was my response that I posted also on Mike’s blog.

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Blooms, former and revised, are used as a framework for cognitive levels of tasks- test questions, performance-based tasks, etc.

What is interesting is not the misapplication, probably not an accurate term in my opinion, but more so a morphing of Bloom’s. What this hierarchy that Mike has created now seems to pigeon hole specific technologies in various levels of cognitive difficulty.

Last week when I was talking to my undergraduate preservice teachers about the Revised Bloom’s and technology one point that they kept coming back to was a technology (alone) does not constitute a higher level or lower level task. Blogs can be used (and are commonly used by K-12 students) for lower level knowledge, just as YouTube could be used as a springboard for a higher level task or a lower level task as Mike has characterized it.

I think that Mike’s hierarchy helps push the conversation forward– how do we utilize these high-leverage technologies (wikis, blogs, multimedia creation tools) and ensure that students are engaging in high quality tasks that develop their higher-order thinking skills?

Andrew Church provided us with some ideas on this in 2007 that help me think about how I prepare future and current teachers to use these technologies themselves or with their students.

Technology Integration Showcase: Kindergarten

By Heather Cline
Kindergarten Teacher, D.J. Montague Elementary School, Williamsburg, VA

In the Virginia Social Studies standards, my Kindergarten students need to learn basic map and globe skills related to positioning and location. I used children’s literature and Google Earth to give students experiences with maps. As a class we read “Me on the Map” by Joan Sweeney and Annette Cable and spent time talking about maps and our location using Google Earth. From there, students used a classroom map that our media specialist had made and students had to use the map to find “hidden treasures” around the room.

All in all, the students were so amazed at the Google earth site. We found our school and then I showed them my house. A bunch of the kids kept asking me to repeat the name of the site so they could go home and look up their house! It was a perfect match to the book “Me on the Map.” As for the next part with the classroom map and using a legend, that went well too. There were treats all over the room, but they could only have the one that was in the spot marked on their map. They helped each other find the right spots.