3-12, Bloom's Taxonomy, Books, Language Arts, Teaching Tools

A Journey Through Lumio with Bloom’s Taxonomy

This post is sponsored by Lumio. All opinions are my own.

The best educational technology tools out there are: easy-to-use, engaging, empowering, and elastic. By “elastic” I mean that they have flexibility, which applies not only to the devices on which they can be used but the settings in which teachers would like to use them. Many programs out there, for example, can be great for checking student memory retention with multiple choice questions, but they won’t work for activities that address the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy such as, “Evaluate,” or “Create.” On the other extreme, you may have an educational technology tool that has an endless number of applications, but it’s incredibly time-consuming to learn how to use it – so it becomes another wasted resource. Lumio, however, separates itself from these polar opposites because it fulfills all four of the essential criteria.

You may recall my initial post, “5 Smart Ways to Engage Your Students with Lumio,” in which I described the versatility of this free digital learning tool suitable for any classroom with student devices. In that article, I wanted to give you an overview of some of Lumio’s features. Today, I’d like to do a deeper dive into Lumio by giving you some concrete examples of how it is: easy-to-use, engaging, empowering, and elastic. To do this, I’d like to demonstrate how simple it is to address any level of Bloom’s Taxonomy with Lumio.

Let’s imagine, for a moment, that you are a teacher who has just finished reading the novel, Tuck Everlasting, with your students.

Once you’ve finished reading the book, you want to get an up-to-date snapshot of how the students are doing when it comes to remembering the important story details, so you quickly whip up a Monster Quiz because you know it will give you good information and your students thrive on friendly competition.

Using Monster Quiz to “Remember” Tuck Everlasting details.

Following completion of the online quiz, you decide to gather even more information with another quick formative assessment so you can hit the “Understand” level of Bloom’s. You move to the next slide in your presentation, and students are greeted by a Sorting Activity with one container for Angus Tuck and one for The Man in the Yellow Suit. Students show both their understanding of the novel and these two main characters by dragging quotes you’ve selected to the correct options.

“Understand” Tuck Everlasting with the Sorting Activity from Lumio

After students reflect on how they did on these activities, you are ready to make a plan to continue reviewing with students who may need it, while others can advance through some of the higher levels of Blooms. They can work at their own pace either independently or in groups as they perform Lumio’s Matching Activity to apply what they know and have inferred about the characters. You assign them to match characters from the novel to how they would react in completely different 21st century situations. Which character would most likely spread fake news on social media? Who would be the first volunteer to start a colony on Mars? 

“Apply” what you learned from Tuck Everlasting with Lumio’s Sorting Activity

So far, these have all been activities where you might expect certain answers, and Lumio’s tools will check them for you and provide results. With the interest of introducing more rigor, you want to design some higher order thinking activities that are more open-ended. You decide to have students discuss and analyze in collaborative groups by providing them the Venn Diagram from Lumio’s set of graphic organizers to compare/contrast two of the characters. Though could be done on paper, having it in Lumio makes it easy to display responses to the whole class so they can debate the responses while using supporting evidence from the novel. You also have a digital record you can refer to later to look for misunderstandings or learning growth.

“Analyze” the characters of Tuck Everlasting with the Venn Diagram Template in Lumio’s library.

When you feel like students are prepared to advance to the Bloom’s Level, “Evaluate,” the Lumio Ranking Tool is perfect. One feature of this “elastic” tool is that you can select, “Don’t Check,” when setting up the activity, and you definitely expect and hope for different responses as you ask your students to rank the characters in Tuck Everlasting from the least to most courageous. This will generate enthusiastic discussions in your class as the students defend their choices with examples from the story. 

“Evaluate” the courage of the characters in Tuck Everlasting with Lumio’s Ranking Activity

Finally, your students are ready to create. You elect to give them several choices using the Tic-Tac-Toe Board Template in Lumio, including both physical and digital options. Ones that they could do within a self-paced Lumio activity might be: creating Black-Out Poetry with a PDF of a page from the novel you’ve uploaded, creating an advertisment the Man in the Yellow Suit might design for his magical water, or making a scrapbook page for one of the characters using images the students upload with Lumio’s safe-search tool.

“Create” with this Tic-Tac-Toe template from Lumio.

As you can see from these examples, Lumio is a robust collaborative learning tool product that allows both teachers and students to work at different levels. From designing the lesson to implementing it and revising as you go along, teachers can set themselves and their students up for success.

Want to begin using Lumio today? It’s free. Click here to get started!

Apps, Bloom's Taxonomy, Education, K-12, Teaching Tools

Stick Pick (Reblog)

I originally posted this 5 years ago.  I was recently discussing it with my colleagues because we are trying to work on better questioning, and thought it couldn’t hurt to reblog about this app.
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Stick Pick is an app with great potential as a teacher tool. The teacher can add one or more classes within the app. To each class, the teacher adds individual student names, determining the type and level of questioning to use for each student from the following categories: Bloom’s Taxonomy, Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy, or ESL. Once all students are entered, their sticks appear in a cup from which the teacher can randomly or purposefully choose names. As each student is chosen, a list of question stems from their particular assigned level appears on the screen. This is a wonderful way for teachers to differentiate impromptu questions for students.

Bloom's Taxonomy, Education, K-12, Teaching Tools

SOLO Taxonomy

SOLO stands for “Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes”.  I came across this taxonomy when I was researching another resource that I will be offering in tomorrow’s post.  I thought it might be helpful to offer this one first just in case you, like me, have never heard of SOLO.

The graphic below, taken from the Otonga Primary School blog, gives an overview of SOLO:

 

I highly recommend that you visit the Otonga Primary School site, as it gives great examples of each of the thinking stages.

Some of you may note that this looks a bit like Bloom’s Taxonomy.  I noticed this, too.  So, I dug a bit deeper to try to find the difference, and discovered this page by Pam Hook that outlines what she considers to be the advantages of SOLO over Bloom’s.  I am not certain I agree with all of her statements, particularly that Bloom’s Taxonomy is more for teacher use than student use, but this post does help to clarify some of the differences.

I have not had professional development with SOLO, so I cannot speak to its effectiveness, but I do think that it is an interesting concept, and I am particularly intrigued by the Relational stage, which I will discuss more in tomorrow’s post.

 

3-12, Bloom's Taxonomy, Education, Independent Study, Student Products, Teaching Tools

The New Differentiator

Ian over at byrdseed.com has revised his Differentiator tool, and it looks great.  This is a great resource for teachers (or students who are good at working independently), allowing you to target different thinking skills for groups of students based on their needs.  You can add depth and complexity to the required content, offer up different choices for resources or products, and select the number of students in each group.  The best part?  It now works on iPads! (I previously mentioned this tool in my “Extend-a-Menu” post.)

Bloom's Taxonomy, Education, K-12, Teaching Tools

Flipping Bloom’s Taxonomy

from http://plpnetwork.com/2012/05/15/flipping-blooms-taxonomy/

In “Flipping Bloom’s Taxonomy“, Shelley Wright proposes that, in the 21st century, our students would benefit more by beginning with “Creating” and working their way to “Remembering”.  She gives some great examples of how this can be applied in the classroom in her article.  The concept seems to be both simple and revolutionary at the same time.  Her final statement is that, “Blooms 21 actively places learning where it should be, in the hands of the learner.”  If that is the result of this approach, it seems to me that it is well worth trying.

Apps, Art, Bloom's Taxonomy, Creative Thinking, Education, K-12, Student Products, Websites

Shape Collage

Shape Collage is a free app for iDevices that allows the user to use photos on the device to create collages in different shapes, such as stars, paw prints, puzzle pieces, etc…  You can even type in your own text, and the photos will conform to the words. Once you have created the collage, you can save it to your Photo Album, or share it via Facebook, Twitter, or e-mail.  If you do not have an iDevice, there is a similar program online called Loupe.  The biggest difference between the app and the website is that, on Loupe, you are loading your pictures from an online sharing site, and do not have the option to load them directly from your computer.

Shape Collage is a great app for Creating, the highest level of Bloom’s New Taxonomy.  Students can create collages that conform to shapes related to what they are studying, or the shape of a text that gives a meaningful message.  The collages can be another way for students to express themselves poetically with pictures.