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Showing posts from November, 2013

Striving for Higher-Order Thinking and Depth of Knowledge

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A little over a year ago, I read Higher-order thinking is the exception rather than the norm for most classrooms on Scott McLeod's blog, Dangerously Irrelevant , and have been mulling it over, wondering if our school district is any different. Over the past year, our teachers periodically collect data with their teams on the types of questions/tasks they ask students. One teacher records teacher questions and the other records student responses on a shared Google Doc ; then teams sort through their own data, plotting teacher questions by Bloom's Revised Taxonomy , and student responses to those questions/tasks with Webb's Depth of Knowledge (DOK) . The 2012-2013 data showed we were not very different from other districts; therefore, our teams set their own goals for higher-order thinking and depth of knowledge. The data so far for the 2013-2014 school year shows questions asked of students are up and down the Bloom's ladder, equally distributed (with a little

Nominations for the 2013 Edublog Awards

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The purpose of the Edublog Awards , or Eddies, is to raise awareness of educational blogging and social media for learning. Image Credit: Edublogs Here are my nominations: Best individual blog -- Mrs. Yollis' Classroom Blog ( Linda Yollis ) Best group blog -- Cougar News Blog (authored completely by 7th & 8th grade students, with the guidance from Journalism Teacher Jason Davis ) Best new blog -- Salsich Team 5 ( Jonah Salsich 's Class Blog) Best class blog -- Mrs. Hamman's Class Blog (posts are mainly written by the students) Best student blog -- Em's Canvas (2nd grade student) Best ed tech / resource sharing blog -- Langwitches ( Silvia Rosenthal Tolisano ) Best teacher blog -- EdTech Workshop ( Andrea Hernandez ) Best library / librarian blog -- Bulldog Reader's Blog ( Julie Hembree ) Best administrator blog -- This and That ( Jon Castelhano ) Most influential blog post of the year -- My TEDxDesMoines video: From Fear to Emp