Suzanne's Ed Tech Reflections

Feedly is a great app for reading and organizing your favorite blogs, online magazines, and news sites. Feedly turns webpages into beautiful cards that are easy to read and can be synced across all of your devices.

As the third year of Project iAchieve begins, several new teachers will be joining the team. Prior to the start of school we were able to provide two full days of training for both the continuing and the new project teachers. The two day training covered management of the iPods and cart, syncing, procedures, oral reading fluency practice, and using many of the new apps that were added for the year. The teachers were also given new document cameras to use in their classrooms, as well as a new teacher iPod. Everyone is very excited about beginning a new year with the iPods and all of the great learning that will take place in their classrooms.

In previous posts I have written about iPad and iPod apps and their alignment to Bloom's Taxonomy and November’s Digital Learning Farm. There are several ed techers out there that have created charts showing these alignments. Another project based inquiry model is the 5 E’s: engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate. On her TL Under Construction blog, Teacher Librarian Cathy Hainstock has developed a chart aligning iPad/iPhone apps to each of the 5 E levels. She details her thinking during the creation of the chart and you can download a pdf version  from her blog: Click here . Another tool to assist us in using our apps to best support student learning. Thanks Cathy! Check out these sites to learn more about the 5 E’: http://waww.miamisci.org/ph/lpintro5e.html http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/nasaeclips/5eteachingmodels/index.html http://faculty.mwsu.edu/west/maryann.coe/coe/inquire/inquiry.htm

Alan November is an international leader who promotes improving teaching and learning and is a strong supporter of education technology. He has written several books (some of my favorites!) and presents and lectures at conferences across the country. A couple of years ago he came up with the concept of the Digital Learning Farm. He talks about a time when farming was an essential part of the American landscape and students contributed to the growth and success of the family farms. They had very specific jobs and were essential to the survival of their family. As society became industrialized, the work of children turned to schoolwork and they played a more passive role in society. Mr. November feels that as our society becomes more and more globalized it is imperative that students once again become strong contributors, especially within their learning communities. He promotes utilizing six jobs in the learning community that can accomplish this: ·   ...

Just learned about this great new App website called Appitic ( http://appitic.com/ ) created by four Apple Distinguished Educators. All of the Apps are educational and have been organized into categories, including Blooms Taxonomy and Multiple Intelligences. In  addition to the main categories (e.g., Blooms Taxonomy or Themes), the Apps have been separated into subcategories. For example, under Blooms Taxonomy and Creation they have broken it down into Apps that that could be used for storytelling, video telling, animating, or podcasting.   This will definitely be one of my first "go to places" when looking for new Apps for our iPods and iPads in the classroom!

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...