Relationships between Bloom’s & SAMR

Bloom’s and SAMR

When it comes to lower level thinking skills (remembering and understanding in Bloom’s Taxonomy), the use ICTs doesn’t provide much bang for your buck. And I can see why the use of ICTs would be more appropriate for extended tasks and high order thinking skills like analysing, evaluating and creating. But over the past few weeks, I have watched my husband struggle to teach our 4 year old to write in Japanese. She happily goes off to school each day and comes home having mastered yet another letter of the alphabet. But she was steadfast in her refusal to try to learn to write in Japanese. He was getting pretty depressed by the whole thing, and I was following closely because I could see that I would probably face the same issues (hopefully with a few less tantrums) when I enter a classroom filled with Year 7 students who have been told they have to learn Japanese.

But last weekend, there came a break through. He found an ipad game that helps kids learn to recognise and write hiragana (Japanese script). It’s really only Substitution in the SAMR model, it replaces a pen and paper and some flash cards. But it was like a magic wand as far as our four year old was concerned. Now she asks him if they can do some learning!

So I think there is a place for the lower levels of the SAMR technology integrations: Substitution and Augmentation. And I certainly think that neither Bloom’s Taxonomy or the SAMR Model necessarily have to be followed in a rigidly linear fashion when planning lessons. Even in the final stages of complex task involving the creation of new materials, students still might want to use an online dictionary to look something up.

Diagramming Bloom’s and SAMR

Adapted from:

https://juliaec.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/blooms-taxonomy-encouraging-higher-cognitive-thinking-in-primary-school-classrooms/

and

http://www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/

Bloom’s and SAMR in Practice

In order to organize my thoughts on how Bloom’s taxonomy and the SAMR model relate, I designed some ICT activities for a Japanese classroom where students are learning about everyday life in Japan.

Key words: match, name, list, label, recognise, know, identify

Students view youtube videos about everyday life in Japan. 

Key words: explain, give examples, estimate, infer, extends

Students look at blogs written by people living in Japan, and interact with them. They make lists of similarities and differences between their own daily lives and the lives of people living in Japan. Students use online dictionaries to look up any Japanese words that come up which they don’t yet know.

Key words: compare, contrast, diagram, create

Students create a video (video camera, Moviemaker or Ulead software to edit) about a day in their own personal lives, keeping in mind what they have learnt about life in Japan and choosing things that therefore might be of interest to someone in Japan.

Key words: create, compare, contrast, critique, defend, compile, explain

Students share their videos in an online classroom with students in Japan, who in turn share their own videos. They compare life in Japan and Australia. They comment on the videos and discuss why they chose to include the things they did.

In this particular case, the activities did follow quite a linear path from knowledge and understanding through to complex thinking for creation and evaluation.

References

http://www.schrockguide.net/samr.html

https://juliaec.wordpress.com/2011/03/23/blooms-taxonomy-encouraging-higher-cognitive-thinking-in-primary-school-classrooms/

http://www.hippasus.com/rrpweblog/