In Touch: Bloom's Digital Taxonomy

Most educators have heard of Bloom’s Taxonomy and how he proposed that learning fit into one of three psychological domains – cognitive, affective and psychomotor moving from lower order thinking skills to high order thinking skills. The original taxonomy categories are:

Knowledge

Comprehension

Application

Analysis

Synthesis

Evaluation

Then in 2001 a revised taxonomy was developed by Lorin Anderson and D Krathwohl which listed the categories as:

Remembering

Understanding

Applying

Analyzing

Evaluating

Creating

Recently I read an article about Bloom’s Taxonomy in the digital world from an educator named Andrew Churches. Briefly outlined, this is how Andrew sees teachers using technology with the revised taxonomy in the digital world.

Remembering – retrieval of information
Digital World – bulleting to mark key words, bookmark websites, social bookmarking or Googling

Understanding – interpreting, summarizing, paraphrasing, comparing
Digital World – refining basic searches, Blog journaling, Twittering, categorizing, commenting / annotating files

Applying – implementing using information and executing tasks
Digital World – initiating a program, operating / manipulating hardware and applications, gaming technology, uploading and sharing of materials on sites such as Flickr, editing Twitters or blog journals

Analyzing – comparing, organizing, structuring and integrating
Digital World – mash ups (several data sources melded into single usable information), links within documents and webpages, validating information found on the web, making judgments about found information, tagging, meta-tagging

Evaluating – hypothesizing, critiquing, experimenting, judging, testing and monitoring
Digital World – blog commenting and reflecting, posting threaded discussions, moderating blogs, effective collaboration that involves evaluating the strengths and abilities of participants, evaluating the contributions of others, testing: analyzing the purpose of a tool or process, analyzing and evaluating data sources and making judgments

Creating – designing, constructing, planning, producing, inventing, devising and making
Digital World – Programming, filming, animating, videocasting, podcasting, mixing and remixing to create unique products, directing and producing, publishing, video blogging, building / compiling mash ups and at the highest level creating a program application or developing a game

This is an excellent article to assist teachers as they implement digital tools into the curriculum. Included in Andrew Churches’ article are more detailed examples for each category and scoring rubrics.

Listed are several links to learn more about the revised Bloom's Taxonomy and Bloom's Digital Taxonomy by Andrew Churches: