Bloom's Taxonomy

If you've been kicking around the education game for any time at all, Bloom's Taxonomy would have grazed your consciousness.

• Knowledge
• Comprehension
• Application
• Analysis
• Synthesis
• Evaluation

At my regular fortnightly meeting this week with my Year 12 student mentor group - half a dozen fabulous kids! - I used this to get them thinking about how they learn, not just the ever-demanding what they learn.  We went round the table, with each nominating one subject and the level at which they thought they were currently operating in that subject.  From thinking about themselves, and considering the answers of their colleagues, it gave them food for thought.

I used the version I found here. (There are a whole bunch of great links and content on that site about study skills).  It includes very handy lists of verbs associated with each level in the taxonomy; verbs that the students could link to the wording/requirements of questions/assignments etc. 

For senior students, there is real value in encouraging them to take that step back to consider how they learn, and thus how they might develop/improve, and Bloom's Taxonomy is but one tool that helps this process.

Cheers

Ruth

PS I know the picture (taken using Hipstamatic!) is a pretty bad pun - but at least it's pretty!

Habits and senior students

I've been part of a team presenting a study skills program to Year 11 students this term, aiming to bed them down effectively with the tools they need to handle the demands and requirements of senior studies effectively.

Image source

The habits they have, and the habits they need are not always the same thing.  And change is never easy.

Came across this blog entry about habits and how to change them - and why it is so hard; which will be worth sharing through study skills and with my Year 12 mentor students.

The summary is this:

1. Most of our day-to-day actions are ruled by habit, custom, and environment.


2. Reflective thinking/planning goes a long way towards finding new things to do, but it’s still very easy to default to habits, custom, and environment.

3. The process of changing habits and customs takes a while. I call it “scratching and clawing forwards” – that’s what it feels like sometimes.

4. Set small, achievable goals on habit/custom change. I recommend aiming for 70% success rates, and making consistent incremental progress.

5. The biggest bang for your buck in the short term is moving your environment around. This can be big stuff like finding a new place to hang out after work, or little stuff like setting your gym clothes by your shower the night before. It works.

Cheers

Ruth

Found indirectly via Twitter

Image is Creative Commons licensed, from Flickr.

Why students should be blogging

Blogging has the potential to reach and influence many. Furthermore, it has greater potential for being a life-long skill. And isn’t that our goal in education? People from all walks and professions blog for the purpose of teaching, creating, and informing. And in the masters courses I’ve taken, so far, I haven’t written a paper, but both have required blogs. Why? Because blogging is the new persuasive essay.


If we’re trying to prepare our students to think critically and argue well, they need to be able to blog. It allows for interaction. It allows for ideas to be tested. And the best posts tend to have a point that can be argued.


I think blogging across the curriculum, not just in Language Arts, allows for both formative and summative assessment. Blogs allow us to see the progression in the development of both thinking and writing. It may actually take more talent to create an interesting, persuasive post on the French Revolution, than a traditional essay.

Shelley Wright, in her blog Wright's Room, arguing that Blogging is the New Persuasive Essay.

When the DET in NSW released its blogging platform BlogEd last year, I took the time to play and learn and then to do a presentation at a staff meeting.  I'm not sure that many of my colleagues took up blogging with their classes, and for many, it was probably because they saw it as another extra looking for space and time in an already full teaching program.

The angle of this blog entry is one that could help some of them review their approach, and hopefully integrate blogging into that already full teaching program as an alternative teaching strategy rather than an extra.  I would guess that this is a common problem with new ideas/sites/platforms/programs/technology; unless a teacher tries it, or until a teacher sees its value in their classroom, it will likely be seen as an extra, with lower priority than the sheer busy dailiness of the classroom and its demands.  It's an ongoing challenge to create the bridges/find ways to change this perspective.

One of the roles of the teacher librarian is to be a learner and teacher in relation to new technologies, and I am regularly consulted on technology matters by colleagues.  One important aspect is being a user-friendly resource - I sometimes get the questions people are concerned may seem 'stupid'; they know I'll answer without judgement and will help.  Me, I'm well aware that I am as much if not more a learner, so that's part of what drives my user-friendly, non-judgemental approach.  I'll add this article to the staff blog I write for my colleagues (another avenue to share information and ideas).

Cheers

Ruth

How to learn? from mistakes (Diana Laufenberg)

To start the new school year*, an inspirational TED talk about teaching



Her three key points (and please do watch the video, don't just clock these and click on in your travels - it's a great ten minutes) are:

• experiental learning
• student voice
• embracing failure

Page URL if the video doesn't work for you:
http://www.ted.com/talks/diana_laufenberg_3_ways_to_teach.html

Cheers

Ruth

*Yes, the Australian school year follows the calendar - we've just finished our summer holidays and are back for a new school year.

A vision of 21st century teachers

YouTube URL for this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4g5M06YyVw

One for staff meetings/professional development?

Found via Lowden Clear blog.

Cheers

Ruth

Libraries and librarians as sponsors of literacy

An excellent slideshow presentation from Buffy J. Hamilton.

Libraries and Librarians As Sponsors of Literacy

View more presentations from Buffy Hamilton.

Plenty of food for thought, for teachers as well as teacher librarians.  Found via Twitter.

Cheers

Ruth

The secrets of storytelling

Our love for telling tales reveals the workings of the mind, according to Jeremy Hsu in his article, The secrets of storytelling, from Scientific American.  The article covers the following key concepts:

Storytelling is a human universal, and common themes appear in tales throughout history and all over the the world.


These characteristics of stories, and our natural affinity toward them, reveal clues about our evolutionary history and the roots of emotion and empathy in the mind.


By studying narrative’s power to influence beliefs, researchers are discovering how we analyze information and accept new ideas.
 
Which means to me as a TL that stories/fiction (and I've heard people say it could be done by local libraries, and the fiction section isn't necessarily an essential part of a school library...) are most important to education and learning.  Who'd'a thunk?!
 
We tell stories about other people and for other people. Stories help us to keep tabs on what is happening in our communities. The safe, imaginary world of a story may be a kind of training ground, where we can practice interacting with others and learn the customs and rules of society. And stories have a unique power to persuade and motivate, because they appeal to our emotions and capacity for empathy.



Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history.

Worth reading.  I found the reference to this article here.  Hmmm.  Might save this article to use to promote the next round of holiday borrowing.


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Vignette: Ha! Snort! and Yay!

Scene: a school library.  Junior high school science class is in to research Michael Faraday, Mr Galvani and Mr Volta and Why They Are Important.

Teacher sits them on the library steps (inside) to tell them about the assignment.  Reminds them that information may be sourced from computers and also from lovely things called, wait for it, books.

Class groans.  Books?  No THANK you.

Teacher Librarian wafts over to class.  Invited to speak by teacher, teacher librarian points out that foolish researchers rely only on the internet.  Wise ones use a variety of resources.  And books can be faster than computers, believe it or not.  Students are polite, but disbelieving.

Lesson slightly tweaked.  Students get divided into two groups: each to get 18 min on the internet computers (where they all want to be), and 18 minutes using book and print resources (cue another groan, but not quite as definite).

Teacher takes the computer group, I take the book group.  We rapidly find a range of book resources - encyclopedias (general and scientific), dictionaries of biography, books on famous scientists and discoveries.  We talk about reading through once, then making notes the second time through, to suit the questions being asked.

Six minutes in, all the book kids have resources in front of them and are reading/making notes.  Two of the computer kids have logged all the way in to the net and actually landed on something vaguely useful.  Others are either still logging in or are wrestling with search terms (some just type in slabs of text from the assignment, as far as I can tell) or just go straight to Wikipedia.  Teacher librarian points out to the computer kids, in possibly not such subtle terms as might have been used, but there you are, TLs are only human, that the book kids will be getting more free time after school, since they have made more progress during class time.

Ten minutes in, the book kids are humming along.  And have been joined by most of the computer kids.  For the rest of the lesson, although the computers are available, they will end up only being used by half the class or less.  The rest use the books, which efficiently provide fast and focused information.

I think at one point I might have whooped in a smug fashion when a kid remarked that the books were much better to use for this assignment.  Me, I'm no Luddite: but I don't think that class will groan again when they have to use books (I suggested to the teacher that maybe assignment parameters could include the requirement of a variety of print and digital resources.  He was happy with how the lesson went, and that the students did have the value of books reinforced).

It's partly to do with the magnetic appeal of the keyboard and mouse, and the other options they offer for exploration when the teacher isn't watching the screen, and the delusion under which students labour, that the quick loading of the internet translates automatically to relevant information.  No, it isn't magic, kiddies. 

But sometimes they need a practical demonstration.  Discovery learning.

5 Ways to Get Out of Faffing Mode

One for the senior students, perhaps? As teacher librarians, we have got opportunities to convey dispassionate advice - some seniors we rarely see, while others work in the library whenever they have a study period. Giving them a cheery greeting as they walk up to the senior study, or advising them about which areas of the library are booked/not booked, all these things build bridges, make the library staff known as people who help. Not that this prevents the necessity of pinging them at times for being too noisy, or the need to point some faffers, who are disturbing others, in the direction of the door.

When I was a year adviser, I maintained a page on the school's network for my year group, and this is the sort of link I would have added to the section on study skills: 5 ways to get out of faffing mode (courtesy of lifehack.org).

Don't Panic! The Hitchhiker's alternative to Wikipedia - h2g2

h2g2 was inspired by Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Launched in 1999, it was taken over by the BBC in 2001.

As with Wikipedia, its entries are written by its readers, and thus share the same reliability and unreliability.

From a school point of view, it provides another alternative in similar form for comparing/contrasting/evaluating.

Teens and Social Media

In researching a staff presentation on internet use among young people, I came across the Pew Internet site. Lots of useful research reports. Here's one of their most recent ones:

Teens and Social Media: The use of social media gains a greater foothold in teen life as they embrace the conversational nature of interactive online media
12/19/2007 Report Amanda Lenhart Mary Madden Alexandra Rankin Macgill Aaron Smith

Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004.

Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys, however, do dominate one area - posting of video content online. Online teen boys are nearly twice as likely as online girls (19% vs. 10%) to have posted a video online somewhere where someone else could see it.

The survey found that content creation is not just about sharing creative output; it is also about participating in conversations fueled by that content. Nearly half (47%) of online teens have posted photos where others can see them, and 89% of those teens who post photos say that people comment on the images at least "some of the time."

However, many teen content creators do not simply plaster their creative endeavors on the Web for anyone to view; many teens limit access to content that they share.

There is a subset of teens who are super-communicators -- teens who have a host of technology options for dealing with family and friends, including traditional landline phones, cell phones, texting, social network sites, instant messaging, and email. They represent about 28% of the entire teen population and they are more likely to be older girls.

Link to the full report: click here.

Citation machine

I haven't played with this one yet, but if it does what it says, it's a promising tool, especially for senior students:

Son of Citation Machine.

(I note at the end of the page that it 'enjoyed' major revisions. Isn't it nice to know websites can enjoy things?)