Investigating Bloom's Taxonomy

By Richard Cole

While reflecting on the similarities and differences between the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Digital Bloom’s Taxonomy, I noticed that teaching the video production process to any students can utilize quite a few of the thinking skills, from lower order through the higher order.  Instead of finding ways to improve my lessons for this process, I’d rather show how I’ve developed a process that is in line with today’s Digital Bloom’s Taxonomy.

At the in the Pre-Production step of the process, the team of students (collaboration is a key element used in this area) needs to come together to brainstorm ideas for the video they are to create.  This step requires students to utilize lower order thinking skills like Remembering.  Student in my classes use a digital tool called Popplet to create their brainstorming mind maps.  To help expand the key ideas in the story, research is often needed to gather background information to add depth to the story; this entails Bloom’s level of Understanding by doing internet research and summarizing the information.

In order to execute the idea, the students need to create a storyboard that illustrates what the finished video product should look like.  Storyboarding has the students thinking at the Applying and Analyzing levels of the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy.  In addition to executing the idea, students have to outline, structure and mesh their ideas together to create their storyboard.  A storyboard also contains much of their video’s dialog, so script writing usually occurs at this step.

With the Pre-Production phase out of the way, students now move on to the Production step.  Essentially, video is shot from the storyboard and graphics are obtained and/or created.  This step requires the students to move into the higher order thinking skills by working in the Evaluating area of the taxonomy.  When trying to move the storyboard to the video camera, multiple shots need to be taken and some experimentation needs to occur (with angles and depth of shots).  Of course Creating is also in play as the students are filming and making a movie.

In the final step of the video production process, Post-Production, students revisit the HOTS levels of the taxonomies while editing and creating the story.  Often, some students in the group work on graphic animations to be used in the video, so animation skills of creation are employed.  Once editing is complete, the video is ready for export and distribution.

I do know of one area that I could change in my lessons to facilitate even more technology integration.  I could use online tools (both free and paid) for students when they are creating their storyboards.  Currently, we usually create them with pencil and paper to sketch what we want the camera shots to look like.  By using an online storyboarding tool, the students could get beyond any artistic limitations they (and I) may have.  Tools like these usually allow for the dragging and dropping of images for backgrounds, props and characters to help illustrate the shot type that they would like to achieve.

While the Revised Bloom’s Taxonomy and the Digital Bloom’s Taxonomy are both in play in the learning processes of a well-put together lesson, teachers should be leaning towards implementing more of the Digital Bloom’s verbs into their lesson activities to help ensure that their students are being better prepared for today’s digital world.  By simply sticking to the revised taxonomy, you would be selling your students short.

Bibliography

Revised Bloom's Taxonomy. (n.d.). In University Tunku Abdul Rahman. Retrieved January 17, 2014, from http://www.utar.edu.my/fegt/file/Revised_Blooms_Info.pdf

Churches, A. (2009, January 4). Bloom's digital taxonomy. In edorigami.wikispaces.com. Retrieved January 17, 2014, from https://edorigami.wikispaces.com/file/view/bloom's+Digital+taxonomy+v3.01.pdf