Bloom's and Marzano Lessons

Blooms verbs are bolded.

Digital Bloom’s Level	Marzano’s Strategy	Content Area	Lesson Idea
Creating	Identifying Similarities and Differences	Math	Students will be able to collaborate to design analogies to relate what they know about geometry to new geometry concepts. For example: circumference is to circle as perimeter is to polygon. They will then be blogging their analogies on our class blog.
Creating	Nonlinguistic Representations	Science	Students will be able to plan, design, and construct a physical model of the solar system depicting accurate scale. They will then video blog about the whole process.
Evaluating	Generating and Testing Hypothesis	Science	Students will be able to collaborate with their peers to design a science experiment on a topic of their choosing. They will create a hypothesis, test their hypothesis, and monitor the results. They will then create a digital graphic organizer to display their results.
Evaluating	Setting Goals and Providing Feedback	Language Arts	Students will be able to review their own work after they have set writing goals for themselves in writing their personal narrative stories. They will critique themselves and their effort put in. I will provide feedback for students as to how they are progressing towards reaching their goals. They will proceed to write new goals and the process will start over.
Analyzing	Identifying Similarities and Differences	Science	Students will be able to organize information they learn in books about vertebrates and invertebrates using their iPads. They will then compare the two by creating a Venn diagram on their iPads using the Whiteboard app.
Analyzing	Cues, Questions, and Advance Organizers	Social Studies	Students will be able to deconstruct digital interactive maps of early North America from the time of the earliest Americans. They will skim the maps to collect information and organize that information using Google Docs. They will also create links in the Google Docs directly to specific pages on the maps.
Applying	Homework and Practice	Language Arts	Students will be able to operate an iPod and record a video of them reading to practice fluency. They will then upload and share the video with the class.
Applying	Cooperative Learning	Math	Students will be able to run and operate Everyday Math games on desktop computers. Students will work together in cooperative groups to learn the games and practice important math concepts.
Understanding	Summarizing and Note Taking	Language Arts	Students will be able to annotate a piece of text they select from the Time for Kids website. They will then summarize the most important information in a paragraph.
Understanding	Cooperative Learning	Social Studies	Students will read be able to summarize information read in their textbooks about early Spanish explorers of North America collaboratively on a Google Doc. They will also compare explorers against one another and categorize explorers based on common traits.
Remembering	Summarizing and Note Taking	Social Studies	Student will be able to search the Internet with Google to find information about different historical people that relate to the 13 Colonies. They will be highlighting and listing information by creating a web on the Webspiration website.
Remembering	Reinforcing Effort and Providing Recognition	Math	Students will be able to retrieve information off the top of their heads. Students are required to memorize multiplication tables at school. Students have to list the math facts weekly. On my website I will keep a chart of which students have mastered each times table (for example, when they have memorized all their 3s.) We will have a big celebration every time a student achieves mastery of their times tables and provide recognition of all their hard work.

Digital Bloom's Taxonomy

Bloom’s Taxonomy and Revised Taxonomy vs. Digital Bloom’s Taxonomy
Similarities	Differences
-Key terms remain the same from Revised Bloom’s to Digital Bloom’s -Both focus on the spectrum of thinking skills -LOTS- lower order thinking skills           -HOTS- higher order thinking skills -It’s not about the tools needed to learn, more about using the tools -Learning is a process -Neither tell us what to teach, rather they tell us how to teach in order to foster higher order thinking skills	-Verbs are significantly different -Old and Revised Bloom’s stay in the cognitive domain, Digital Bloom’s includes methods -Digital moves towards higher order thinking skills more -Old Bloom’s used Nouns -Revised Bloom’s used Verbs -Digital Bloom’s uses more and newer Verbs -Digital has an emphasis on Collaboration

In my language arts class every year I read aloud The BFG by Roald Dahl. My students and I have a lot of discussions about the characters and their development throughout the story. I teach one particular lesson where we create character maps for several different characters. Every student gets to choose what character to cover. The map includes a paragraph about what we know about the character. The students select several quotes from the book said by their character. They also get to draw a picture of the character. We also write a paragraph about the characters relationships to the other characters.

Skills of character analysis are necessary for my students to posses. However, my current tactic for getting there does not implement any higher order thinking skills. At the most I was asking students to remember and understand. So I decided a more hands on approach to this lesson was necessary. I also thought that a larger more comprehensive project would be greatly beneficial to my students.

This project I plant to call The Sophie Diaries. I will put my students into mixed ability groups so they can collaborate on this project. This will be an ongoing project throughout the whole read aloud and incorporate many reading strategies and higher level thinking skills.   Each group will create a video blog, or vlog, on schooltube.com. The group will work together to analyses the characters and summarize what is going on in the story each chapter. Then, students will assume the role of different characters we come across in the story. For example, one student might act as Sophie in a video vlog. It is as though Sophie was keeping a video diary throughout her whole journey. She records herself speaking, summarizing what is going on in her life at the time, talking about how she is feeling, what she thinks is going to happen next, and her relationship with other characters. Sophie will have vlog entries as well as the BFG, the Fleshlumpeater, and the Queen.            In creating these videos, students not only have to have sympathy, and be aware of how characters are feeling. They also have to have empathy and feel what the characters are feeling.  They will form a much more authentic and complete idea of each character. We can later re-watch these video diary entries to see the entire progression of the story.

In doing this project, students will be using many more of Bloom’s higher order thinking skills. They will also be incorporating Digital Bloom’s taxonomy by vlogging, filming, commenting, collaborating, playing, and editing. They need to use iPads to record the videos and iMac desktop computers to edit the footage together. I will also be showing students how to upload these videos onto the schooltube website themselves. Then students will have to go online and watch the other groups’ videos and comment on them in a positive and constructive way.

By planning with Bloom’s in mind, I have taken a relatively easy and boring lesson and turned it into a truly meaningful project that requires the students to use their higher order thinking skills and they will get much more out of it.

Marzano's Instructional Strategies #1

The first of Marzano’s Instructional Strategies is Identifying Similarities and Differences. This instructional strategy is thought to be essential to human thought and at the heart of all the learning a person does throughout their life. A student’s ability to use knowledge and understand things they learn is broken into four general categories: direct instruction and presentation of similarities and differences, students independently identifying similarities and differences, representing these identified similarities and differences in different graphic organizers, and using different means of similarities and differences including comparing, classifying, creating metaphors, and using analogies. These categories follow a gradual release model, (I do, we do, you do) which is a best practice for any classroom instruction.  

I have done a lot of Identifying Similarities and Differences with my students. When we study Native American tribes, we use Venn Diagrams to compare the different tribes to one another and analyze how the tribes are alike and different. We also study vertebrate animals and we spend a great deal of time and use many different matrices classifying these animals into different categories. I have not done a lot of work with my students in using metaphors. We do discuss idioms and figurative language quite a bit though. I like Marzano’s example in his book of using the idea of making a sandwich related to writing a paragraph. We think about what kind of sandwich we are hungry for first, then that relates to what kind of writing we want to do and what the purpose of that writing is. I never would have thought to use analogies with my eight-year-old students, but analogies would be very beneficial to them. I can create the analogies to be very applicable to what we are learning in class. For example, in math we can make connections to previous content learned by implementing the analogy: circumference is to circle as perimeter is to polygon.  

Identifying Similarities and Differences is a great way for students to make connections and activate their background knowledge to make their learning more meaningful.

Wordles

Here are the links to the Wordle word clouds I created about blogs and wikis:

 http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/6862098/Blog

http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/6862074/Wiki