Bloom’s Strategies: Use tools to emphasize levels

3. Use Technology To Emphasize Specific Levels

As the highest level of Bloom’s revised taxonomy, ‘Create’ requires students to use innovative–or at least inventive–thinking.

While many classrooms force awkward collaboration on students, even with the best of intentions and skilled use of pre-assessment data, this kind of collaboration can stifle student curiosity and individual talents while placing a premium on socialization, procedural knowledge, and assignment compliance.

While this may be ‘real world,’ it could be that there are some parts of that world better left to the lifetime they’ll spend as adults. If we can do better in our design of learning experiences we should, and this means giving every student room to breathe cognitively and creatively.

One approach here is to use digital technology and social media to enable asynchronous collaboration using apps, social media, or digital communities. Here, students can access different strands of a given assignment at their own pace, adding their own thinking, and being able to observe, sit back, internalize,  and then offer strategic input according to their own readiness, background knowledge, and relative expertise.

Note that this can be especially effective for teaching introverts, especially creative introverts that may not be able to advocate for themselves in the pressure of a large group at the social dynamics it represents.