Blog Post #8

Diigo

Diigo is a social bookmarking website that allows its users to save, annotate and share bookmarks with the click of a mouse. As you save the webpages, the bookmarks will sync across your devices so you can access them anytime, anywhere. Not only that, but Diigo makes it easy to organize your bookmarks by providing an option to categorize them by subject matter with hashtags. This feature comes in handy when you want to share your bookmarks with classmates, team members or fellow teachers. You can also highlight and annotate any part of the webpages you save- making this webstie even more adapted for sharing. 

Bloom’s Taxonomy 

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a heirarchal model that classifies six educational learning objectives into levels of difficulty. It starts with creating, then evaluating, analyzing, applying, understanding, and finally, remembering. PowerPoint is a great tool that can be used by teachers to support student learning at each level. The best way to make an idea “click” is to engage students. You gotta get them involved! So first, a teacher might assign a project. In order to get Bloom’s Taxonomy off to a solid start, students would need to create. This first step doesn’t necessarily involve fingers to the keyboard withing the PowerPoint software, but they may stsrt to plan what the presentation may look like. Next, for the evaluation step, they might consider just how their plan would be executed on PowerPoint. Will it be an effective method of disseminating information? For the analysis part, they could analyze and identify what a professional powerpoint presentation looks like. These first three learning objectives involve more thinking than doing. This next step, appyling, is where the process starts to get interesting. It’s here that students would begin to collect information to include in their PowerPoint presentation. Including consise bullet points can help in the understanding process. Finally, students can incorperate images and diagrams to help them remember. 

Tech Innovation 

As teachers, it’s important to keep up to date with what kids are talking about these days (or even the things kids aren’t talking about yet - be the cool teacher and know before they do). The best site I found to stay aware of the most important technological advances without getting caught up in the mumbo jumbo tech talk is the technology section of the New York Times. Here’s the link: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/ The NYT is a leading resouce for all kinds of information, so it’s no surprise that it keeps us up to date with what’s trending in the technology world. With tons of contributers, you can count on the NYT to inform you about product launches, tech conventions, and upcoming gadget decelopments so you can stay the cool teacher :) 

Hr