Experiences and Blog Lesson


Hi,

My professional blog has been quite a task. After setting it up and posting a blog I found that my username and password wouldn’t work anymore so I had to start again. Not a good start to my E-learning experience. After starting a new blogger account again and checking to see if I could log in, to my relief I found that I could. I have found being new to something and not knowing most of its aspects can create mistakes and work can be lost. I’m not sure exactly what happened but on the positive side there are many more benefits to working over the internet that far outweigh the time spent and mistakes made. If nothing else, the internet (including blogs) provides aspects that create variety for students to build their higher order thinking.

Reigeluth and Moore (1999, p. 67) found that ‘learners can learn more through using a reflection phase at the end of a problem solving experience (like one from Blooms Taxonomy), than they learned during the problem solving experience’. When lessons are scaffolded students can build upon their knowledge and higher order thinking is evoked with key questions such as Blooms levels of questioning.

An example of using variety to build higher order thinking with technology in the classroom could be having students build ‘knowledge’ through an excursion. ‘Comprehension’ could then be developed using rotation groups of books, printed resources, organised internet sites, newspaper articles, journal articles and picture resources. With ‘Application’ group posters could be produced and in the ‘analysis’ phase students could create their own blog while having professionals on the topic, other students from other countries, or other students in the same school from a higher grade who have done the topic before respond, building knowledge on each other’s blog. ‘Synthesis’ could be an online letter to the local council, having set up beforehand a member from the council to respond as a whole to the student letters. Lastly, ‘evaluation’ can be individual student thoughts on the topic, what worked and didn’t work, how the group worked together and which area of the process was the favourite, least favourite and why (Huitt, 2004).

What do you think?

From Paul Jak.

Reference List

Reigeluth, C. M., & Moore, J. (1999). Instructional-Design Theories and Models: Vol.2, A New Paradigm of Instructional Theory. Retrieved August 25, 2009, from

http://books.google.com.au/books?hl=en&lr=&id=AbJc4Kg6XQoC&oi=fnd&pg=PA51&dq=Bloom,+B.+S.+(1956).+Taxonomy+of+educational+objectives:+Cognitive+and+affective+domains.+New+York:+David+McKay.&ots=Wzmrl0T8mz&sig=-QNpO-7GfUbYoAmOIW7rwSPHIvw#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Huitt, W. (2004). Blooms Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain. Retrieved August 25, 2009, from http://chiron.valdosta.edu/whuitt/col/cogsys/bloom.html