Web Tools Adorn 21st Century Bloom's Taxonomy

Richard Overbaugh's image

Bloom's Taxonomy has a new face. Well, actually it isn't so new. If it were a human, it would be old enough to drive.

Back in 1956, Benjamin Bloom and his colleagues realized that they didn't have the common vocabulary to discuss types of questions that would be used on test or in class. Some questions only required learners to recall the capital of Iowa, while answering others involved synthesizing ideas from multiple sources to create a new opinion. It took them a couple of years to finalize on the 6 groups that they used in Bloom's original taxonomy. Would you believe that they were arguing about whether to put Evaluation or Synthesis at the top right up to printing time and that it was answered with a coin toss?

In the mid 1990s, Lorin Anderson and a team of cognitive psychologists updated the taxonomy by changing all of the nouns to verbs, adding Creating on the top, and folding synthesis into Evaluating.

This is a welcome change where they put the emphasis for learning on the individual to create. It has been reflected in a variety of tools include the ISTE NETS-S.  ISTE placed the emphasis of using technology on Creating with technology instead of Operating the computers.

Recently, there have been a few educators who have been aligning Web 2.0 tools with Bloom's Taxonomy. This is a useful tool to show the variety of opportunities with the available online tools, but it is also a wonderful way to help classroom teachers link the tools with their curriculum.

Schrock's Google Taxonomy

Kathy Schrock's Bloomin' Google. http://kathyschrock.net/googleblooms/

My favorite arrangement was done by Kathy Schrock. Kathy is always at the head of the pack when it comes to organizing things.  You know, little things like the World Wide Web or the vast collection of Google Tools.  She creates the wonderful instruments and I sit in Awe (just south of Des Moines) asking myself "Why didn't I think to that?"

Anyway, while the image above is linkless - when you go to her Bloomin' Google website each of the logos links directly to the tool (don't click the image above because it won't take you there.) She also is using this as a means for collecting educators' ideas about her creation.  She has included a Google form below the table where teachers can add their "ideas and justifications for why you might have students utilize apps and tools in the cognitive area they appear on the taxonomy"

Penney's Digital Taxonomy Pyramid

Samantha Penney's Digital Taxonomy Pyramid. http://www.usi.edu/distance/bdt.htm

While Kathy limited hers to primarily Google Tools, Samantha Penney at the University of Southern Indiana crossed Bloom's Pyramid with over 50 Web 2.0 tools. Samantha says that she created this for some summer staff development. It is based upon Andrew Church's concept of Bloom's Digital Taxonomy.  She used Go2Web20 and Cool Tools for Schools.

Once again, the image above has no working links, but if you venture over to Bloom's Digital Taxonomy Pyramid you will find that each of the logos links to an individual tool. I haven't checked all of them out yet, but there are a bunch that I have used yet.

This is a wonderful merging of theory with practical application. These organizers provide some sanity in the ever-exploding world of Web 2.0 tools.

Which tools are missing? What do you use that you don't see included on one or both of these charts?

Do you disagree with any of these categorizations? There is often a murky distinction between these levels.  Seems that only academics worry about the strict distinctions, but what do you think?

I challenge you to make your opinion known on the comments below.

Z

Google Wave: Google Docs Meets Email (& Social Networking)

Just watched in introductory YouTubevideo about Google Wave. This was a presentation that was given at the Google I/O 209 conference (for developers). This was an early alpha demo so it crashed a couple of time in the presentation, but that is OK. They were showing this to the developers so that they would develop some apps before they release it next year.

As the title suggests, Google Wave is a new email system that merges the Central Location document concept of Google Docs with Email. This means that instead of having individual emails sent between individuals, the email will be kept in a specific place and then email would be a matter of sending invitations to the desired recipients. It makes A LOT of sense when you think about it.

Wave allows us to share photos by just copying the images into a single place and then each of the recipients will have access. They demonstrated how one person dragged the photos to the email document and it immediately appeared on one of the recipient's screen.

Blogs can be embedded in the Wave as well. It looks like the Wave is all about merging social media and breaking down the interfaces that separate them.

Since the whole system is online, it is accessible through mobile units. Unfortunately, the link didn't work in the demo, but we will believe that it works.

An exciting capability of Wave is its ability to provide collaborative writing. This is similar to the collaborative writing capabilities of Google Docs but it is IMMEDIATE. This means that your changes appear on the screens of ALL of the screens of the participants.

Wave also includes a document history capability similar to wikis. It looked like you would insert comments and track changes so it might be useful for assignment exchange between teachers and students.

I only watched the first 30 minutes but you should watch the rest to see the future.
This is AMAZING!!!

What do you think?

Z

Embedding Google Presentation in Your Blog

One of the greatest features of Google Presentation is that it can be shared with others. You can embed the presentation in a blog like I did below:




You can also access this Google Presentation through this URL.

When you access a Google Presentation in this way, you can actually become 100% engaged in the presentation because you can add your ideas through the chat window. This requires you to sign-in with your Google account, but you become part of the discussion.
I have borrowed instructions in how to do this from the Tech Tips Tuesday blog.

Here's how it works:

1. Go to http://docs.google.com
2. Upload you PowerPoint file to Google Presentations (up to 10MB from your computer)
3. Warning: Not all formatting features from Design Templates will always be preserved and there is NO animation.
4. When you publish your presentation to the Internet anyone will be able to access and view it online. They will also be able to join the presentation online and chat with others also viewing the presentation. Your document will be assigned a unique address (URL) on google.com. To do this go to Share button (upper right of screen) and choose Publish.
5. Click on the published link and this will open up your PowerPoint online and a chat window will appear on the right side of the screen.
6. In order for audience members to discuss the presentation, they will need to log into their Google account so their name will appear in the chat window.
7. Google Presentations also provides you with the embed code if you want to place your Google presentation in a webpage, blog or wiki.
8. Click HERE to view a sample presentation and its chat window.

Perhaps the best part of this using this Presentation program is that you can have multiple people working on it simultaneously. This means that you and a colleague can be in separate rooms in separate cities in separate countries working on different pages of the same presentation. I especially enjoy doing this while using Skype or Google Chat to verbally discuss what we are doing (and make funny faces at my friend while we work.)

What sort of experiences have you had with Google Presentation?

Z

Digital Portfolios Made Easy

Professional portfolios are designed to provide a medium for individuals to collect and share information about themselves. It is important to consider the audience that will be reading and evaluating the portfolio. Often these portfolios are aligned with professional standards. Unfortunately, people are misguided into believing that these standards are the most important part of the portfolio.

That is Totally Bogus!!

The most important part of a portfolio is the person about whom the portfolio is created!!! It is the collection of artifacts that describe the person's strengths and characterize the person as a professional. Envisioning portfolios in this manner will make the creation process relevant rather than drudgerous.

You can read more about my ideas on this at my previous posting entitled Digital Portfolios: Why Do We Do Them?

You can also read another of my postings, Optimal Portfolio Organization, to learn about my suggestions for creating a portfolio.

Middle School Digital Portfolio Workshop

I have had the opportunity to share digital portfolios around the country. I have had the opportunity to present some of these workshops with my DPME co-developer, Andrew Krumm, for a couple of years. Now I do these workshops by myself. For the past few years, I/we have presented a 2-hour workshop for the middle school teacher education students here at the University of Northern Iowa. We thank Dr. Jean Schneider and Dr. Donna Douglas for implementing this system in their program. Last October, we video recorded the workshop.

This semester, we are assuming that the students have enough technology savvy to learn how to create their portfolios by reading the outline while they are watching the recorded workshop. The semester is not over so we don't have any final information, but things are going well so far.

Here are the resources that you will need to do this:

Video of Dr. Z (Leigh Zeitz) giving a workshop on creating digital portfolio to a middle school teacher education students at the University of Northern Iowa. This workshop lasts 1 hour 45 minutes. (this video requires the RealPlayer add-on to watch it.)

MIddle School Portfolio Template website to copy into your portoflio - one screen at a time. This portfolio template is designed to align with the Iowa Teacher Education standards (INTASC + 1). You can find other templates at the Digital Portofolios Made Easy website.

Workshop outline (.pdf) that was used for the workshop. It is possible to use this workshop to follow along with the video.
I hope that you find this useful. Please leave some comments about what you are doing with these templates.

Dr. Z

Google Notes is No More - Enter Zotero

Did you hear? Google has announced that they will not be spending any more time developing Google Notes. Google says that they will continue to support Google Notes but not improve upon it.

Although I have used Google notes some, I have not been an avid user. I am teaching a Seminar in Writing Graduate Papers now at the University of Northern Iowa and I was going to introduce Google Notes next week. Now we will go with Zotero.

Zotero is an add-in for Firefox that helps you collect, manage and cite your research sources. The latest version is 1.0.9 but there is a beta 1.5 version. I don't know the differences, but here are some notes about it.

Here is a pretty good video overview of Zotero 1.5 from Zoteron on YouTube.




Zotero also has a series of screencasts about Version 1.09. They give you an overview, finding items, managing your library, and other features. They even show how to connect Zotero with MS Word, Google Tools, and Flock.

Do you use Zotero or Google Notebook or Zoho or ????

Webspiration: Inspiration on the Web

Inspiration HAS DONE IT!!!
The folks at Inspiration have developed an on-line version of their prize-winning software gem and named it Webspiration. Thinkers, large and small, have huddled around computers for almost two decades using Inspiration to help them organize and develop their ideas. They have worked alone and in groups but the limitation has always been that they could only diagram their ideas on a single computer at a time.

Webspiration elevates Inspiration to the level of online collaborative work tool. Students create an account and then can create diagrams/outlines that are saved on the Inspiration server. Having these maps online makes them accessible from any computer. This is handy for students who want to work on their diagrams at school, home and ??

Collaborative? Yes, the creator of a diagram can share it with collaborators by sending invites to friends who have Webspiration accounts. Collaborators can sign onto Webspiration and work on common diagrams whenever they are interested. Multiple collaborators can also be online simultaneously and work together on the diagram. The only limitation is that the they can't work on the file at the same time. As the video shows, one person works as the editor and the other collaborators are spectators until the active editor passes control over to the next person in line. This makes it less collaborative than Google Docs that allows multiple collaborators to work in a document simultaneously. Is this a problem? It can be. I found that some of my students were OK with waiting in line but others became quite frustrated when they had to "holster" their creativity until it was their time to emote.

Watch this short Jing video that I created to demonstrate Webspiration in my ISTE Webinar.



Watch a larger version of this demo at http://tinyurl.com/5cnxr4 (3 minutes to download)


What's it cost? Right now Webspiration is free! The folks at Inspiration have identified the present version of Webspiration as a Beta Version and they want you to get online and give it a try. They even provided a place where users can provide feedback (although I couldn't find it just now when I checked the most recent version.:-)

Give it a try. Go to http://www.mywebspiration.com and try out the Inspiration of Tomorrow.

For more information, visit the MyWebspiration site.

Comparing News Articles from Around the World

I was just reading the EdTech listserv to which I belong (how's that for fancy writing? ;-).
A teacher was asking about how she could use Google to compare news perspectives from different newspapers around the world.

I was fortunate enough to have attended Alan November's presentation at the ITEC conference in Des Moines last month where he explained how you can do this. After a little experimentation, I was able to reconstruct these steps for finding news articles that are written in specific countries about specific topics.

Let's assume that you want to compare news articles about the President-elect Barack Obama. You want to see what they are saying about him in Poland. You can go to google.pl to use the Polish Google but it will only direct you back to the articles here in the US.

The best way to find articles published in Poland is to search only the Web addresses that end in .pl (Polish domain):

1. Begin by selecting the Advanced Search option on Google.
2. In the "Search within a site or domain:", enter .pl (this will limit it to URLs in Poland).
3. In case you don't speak Polish, select English or your native language in the Language section.
4. Enter Obama in the Search box at the top and you will have a huge list of Polish-published articles that are written in your native language.

Here is a link to an advanced search page that would achieve this.

This could also be used to compare articles on a specific topic that were published in the Los Angeles Times (latimes.com) or the New York Times (nytimes.com).

This could be a powerful tool for learning about the world peoples' opinions on thing that happen in the U.S. and elsewhere.

I am interested in whether you have ever used this in your classes? If so, how did it go? If not, how do you envision yourself as using this strategy?

photo: flickr.com/cikku

Using Google Form for Surveys

As you may or may not know, Dr. Z and Garey G are giving a presentation at ITEC 2008. It is entitled Dr. Z and Garey G's Creative Cookbook for Collaborative Communication. During that presentation, they will be sharing the incredible opportunities available through using Google Forms with Google Docs.

Hopefully, they will have an auditorium full of laptop-toting folks so that they can enter their information into this form. If you would like to make your own contribution, no matter where on earth you are, please complete the form below. You might even tell us of your actual location in the last field.

It would be useful to have your input but it would EXTREMELY IMPRESSIVE if you could add it between 3:00 - 33:0 Central Standard Time. That way the could see you doing it live.

Doodle 4 Google

Just found a fun art contest sponsored by Google.

There is a video on YouTube that introduces you to the guy (Dennis Hwang) who draws the various thematic title pages for Google. It shows a time-lapsed video of him creating one with a couple of mice on it.

When he is finished, he tells you about the contest for k-12 schools. Kids can sign-up their schools to participate. The winner's doodle will be shown on Google for a whole day.

Check it out!!! The 2008 winner in at http://www.google.com/doodle4google/

Google Sites ROCKS!!!

Just found out about Google Sites. It appears to be the next step in the Google Tools quest to create a world of online application tools.

"Google Sites, a new offering from Google Apps, makes creating a team site as easy as editing a document. Use Google Sites to centralize all types of information -- from videos to presentations -- and share your site with just a few people, your entire organization, or the world." sites.google.com

I must admit that I haven't been able to do much more than create an account but it is an interesting process:

Google asked for my email address. Since it was Google, I thought that I would insert my gmail account (leigh.zeitz@gmail.com). Interestingly enough, when I hit the Return key, Google responsed with "Sorry, we are not servicing this domain yet." 0-;

So I entered my regular email account at the University of Northern Iowa and it took it. Google Sites told me that it would send me an email to validate the email account.

WOULD YOU BELIEVE that the email the sent me said that they had validated the domain, uni.edu, and it had the UNI Panther connected to it? How connected it that? Actually, I looked at the list of the 20 UNI folks who had discovered this before me and it was good to see that some of them were students in our Educational Technology minor.

This looks like a wonderful addition to the Google tools and it will revolutionize the meaning of collaborative writing/invention/innovation.

First thing I did to keep from having to read anything was to jump to YouTube.com and here is a video that was create by the Google folks. It is narrated by Scott Johnston who was the VP of Product Development at JotSpot.com As you may know, JotSpot was purchased by Google a while ago and this is the first JotSpot product released under Google's name.

Map of OLPC Schools Around the World

GUESS WHAT? I found a map of the schools that are using the OLPC XO computers. I have embedded the map into this posting (pretty cool, eh?) but you can find the map along with the listing of schools on the OLPC wiki at this Google Map site. It's unusual that there are three schools in Vermont who are using the XOs. I thought that they were limited to developing nations. Maybe those Vermontians are as far along as I have thought. ;-)

2020 Vision

2020 Vision is a 15-minute video developed by Karl Fisch as a staff development video to motivate Arapahoe high school teachers to engage in future visioning. It is set as that graduate speech at a high school graduation for students in 2020. He selected this year because these graduates would have begun kindergarten in 2007.

This video is a story of Google taking over the world. Even has them going into solar cells and developing electric G-Cars. The most important part is his envisioning that Google provides a 9th grade through Masters educational system. If the present schools aren't going to use the educational potential of technology, Google will. He even said that all of these schools are provided free because Google will make enough money on the Google Ads running on their school portals that it covers the cost.

I am not saying that everything that Karl Fisch says is true, but it is interesting. It does provide a reasonable view of what the next 13 years might involve (I especially liked how he referred to actions that President Obama will take =-). It can work as the springboard for discussion which is exactly why he developed it.

Watch it and think . . . and talk . . . and think . . . and do.

The Difference between Blogs and Discussions

Well, I just finished reading all the blogs of all of my students in Emerging Instructional Technologies. It took a few of hours because I hadn't sat down to read them before and we had been writing them for 2 weeks. I had some catching up to do. From this point on, it shouldn't be too bad because I will be able to keep up with you by just reviewing them every couple of days. I will just go to my Google Reader and then look at the one's that sow as new.

I enjoyed reading what all of you said about your lives and what you have found/realized/discovered in this class. Some of you seem to really enjoy the opportunity to share and reflect while others seem to still be in the mode of "completing your duty."

I am new at blogging so I have come to some realizations. These are just preliminary so I know that you will see others appear on this blog as time progresses:

1) Blogs are different than the typical "Discussion Assignment" that you students have done in the past. Typically, in our classes, we have required students to respond to a topic and then write a reply to "at least two other students." These replies have needed to be more than just simple affirmation "I agree with you, Moe."

Blogs need to be more than that. WebCT discussions are usually limited to the members of the class and they rarely introduce links to the rest of the world. What is said there is of great importance, but can be limited. Blogs, on the other hand, are typically open to the world. This means that others can read them and we can link to the rest of the world to enrich and support our thoughts. This is what we call the Blogosphere.

2) Blogs are more interesting if they are "responding to" or "including" information elsewhere in the blogosphere (especially your classmate blogs) and web. Having an active link (remember that you need to use the Link button to make it active) allows the reader to review the material in question and then learn what you have to say about it. It also encourages me, the reader, to be able to have ideas (because I can get to the original material) and respond. This is good because it builds the conversation.

3) You MUST read blogs to know how to write blogs. I have been learning about this as I have been reading more blogs and modeling my blogging around what other, more successful bloggers, have done.

Here is a list of blogs that you should ALL have in your Google Reader:

• Dr. Z Reflects (this blog)
• Every student's blog in our class (listed in the right column in this blog)
• 2 Cents Worth - David Warlick who is continually reflecting upon Web 2.0 tools in the classroom
  
• Stager-to-Go - Provides a questioning look at Web 2.o tools in the classroom
• At least two blogs on your selected theme for the semester. These will help you become better informed of the latest developments as well as allow you a venue for contributing to the discussion.

Well, these are a few of my ideas on blogs vs discussion groups. Please remember that this is not the end of the discourse.

USE THE COMMENTS section to add your opinions about this topic.

Using YouTube to Teach

Well, I just created my first tutorial video for YouTube. Actually, I created it for my Emerging Instructional Technologies course at the University of Northern Iowa, but I am storing it on YouTube. I tried to upload it to TeacherTube, but it took forever to upload it and I finally quit it and went for YouTube.

The tutorial instructs my students how to add blogs to their Google Reader utility. It is quite informal. I did the personal introductory part in my livingroom and then did the screencast (video capture of what was happening on the screen) just using my computer and computer microphone.

This video, Adding Blogs to Your Google Reader is accessible on YouTube for you to watch and then try out.

STUDENTS: I would suggest that you:
1) Watch the video to see how to do it.
2) Try adding this blog, Dr. Z Reflects, to your Google Reader.
3) Go to our wiki page where students are posting their blog addresses
4) Add your classmates' blogs to your Reader and keep up on what they are saying throughout the semester. You might even want to react to their comments to build a REAL learning community.

This may be the beginning of something big.

Z