Suzanne's Ed Tech Reflections

I am once again "The iPod Lady"!! Walked into a classroom this morning and a student very proudly announced to everyone "It's the iPod Lady!" Love it!!

This summer I signed up to participate in Edutopia's New Teacher Bootcamp - one of their Summer Professional Development offerings. Now I am not a new teacher but I knew I would be working with and coaching several new teachers this year. And that this "bootcamp" would provide me with ideas and resources to share with teachers. The "bootcamp" was 5 weeks long and introduced a different Web 2.0 tool each week. The course facilitator provided learners with ideas, models, and links to resources about each tool. We could explore the links and then create a small project using each tool. We utilized a "wiki" during the course to create our portfolios for each tool. Here are the tools we explored: Wordle - create beautiful Word Clouds by simply pasting in some text - and you don't need an account. To learn more, check out the Week 1 Blog . Voicethread - Voicethread is a multimedia slideshow tool that allows viewers (students, parents, teachers)

Bloom's Taxonomy has become a foundation in education for planning, instruction, and learning. In 1956, Benjamin Bloom introduced his continuum of cognitive objectives most appropriately called Bloom's Taxonomy . This taxonomy ranks thinking skills from lower order to higher order. You have to remember or understand a concept before you can analyze or evaluate. In 2001, Lorin Andersen introduced Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. This revision reorder the top two thinking skills and renamed them placing the focus of each level on verbs or actions rather than nouns - knowledge became remembering, comprehension became understanding, and so on. Then in 2007, Andrew Churches took this all a step further and developed Bloom's Digital Taxonomy which connected the objectives to 21st century digital learning and Web 2.0 technologies. Now it is 2011 and learning has becoming mobile. So its just natural that we now transition into identifying the Bloom's leve