On the American Psychological Association website there is a brief article about Bloom’s taxonomy. The website briefly discusses the original Bloom’s as well as recent iterations of the past 8 years. An interesting diagram is the Cognitive Taxonomy Circle developed by Clark (2002). Today, there are many web 2.0 services that can help students create meaningful assessments. So, for a project over the next couple weeks, I plan on locating services that could create various products and basically make this circle come alive. Users will be able to click on a product and be taken to a website (or a selection of websites) to create the product.
Do you know of particular websites that lend themselves to creating these products? What adjustments would you make to this circle? Comment away and let me know! I’m aiming to take the circle live the week of August 11! If I end up doing this in flash, it may be the first week in September - but it will be created!
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Google is hosting a competition for students to customize the Google logo. As career and technology educators, you could have your students enter this contest, focusing on careers, career and technical education, particular career pathways, particular careers, global understanding, etc. Why should you consider this? There is great power in being able to generate meaning through visual representation - it requires critical thinking and synthesis.
Here are some details:
Welcome to Doodle 4 Google, a competition where we invite K-12 students to play around with our homepage logo and see what they come up with. This year we’re inviting U.S. kids to join in the doodling fun, around the intriguing theme “What if…?”
At Google we believe in thinking big, and dreaming big, and we can’t think of anything more important than encouraging students to do the same. So we hope you’ll gather those art supplies and some 8.5×11 landscape paper and encourage your kids to enrich us all with their creative visions of our world, as it is and as it might be.
You’ll find everything you need to get started here, including detailed lesson plans to incorporate the competition into your curricula. Registration closes on March 28th, and entries are due by April 12th. A panel of judges will select 40 finalist doodles, from which the public will help select a favorite to be featured on our homepage on May 22nd, 2008.
Google is supplying some lesson ideas, templates of the graphic, and more. Check the Google for Educators forum and check out other teacher’s experiences with the contest as well as with various Google services.
Need some more inspiration? Watch this video:
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Apple launched the 2007 Insomnia Film Festival:
On Saturday, October 13 at 9:00 a.m. (Eastern time), we’ll post a top-secret list of elements — special props, dialogue, settings — you get the idea. Choose any three to include in your movie. Then all you and your team have to do is write, cast, shoot, edit, score, and upload your 3-minute masterpiece within 24 hours. No problem, right?
A team of New Media students at the Capital Area Career Center took the challenge and created Chump Change.
Family and friends can rate the all the films submitted in the festival, and the shorts will be judged by industry professionals. if you want to vote and have an apple ID you can log in with that (or you can register at the site) but it will want you to retype your information for posting ratings and comments on gallery. A tad cumbersome, but worth it to give some feedback to young filmmakers! Enjoy!
Could we have even imagined this as being a possible assignment 5 years ago?!
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Get excited about data! Data can be beautiful - check out Many Eyes, a tool for web-based data visualization and collaboration.
On Many Eyes you can:
1. View and discuss visualizations
2. View and discuss data sets
3. Create visualizations from existing data sets
If you register, you can also:
4. Rate data sets and visualizations
5. Upload your own data
6. Create and participate in topic hubs
7. Select items to watch
8. Track your contributions, watchlist, and topic hubs
9. See comments that others have written to you
And what kinds of visualizations can you create?
See the world
World map
US Map
Track rises and falls over time
Line graph
Stack graph
Stack Graph for Categories
Compare a set of values
Bar chart
Block histogram
Bubble chart
Matrix chart
See relationships among data points
Scatterplot
Network Diagram
See the parts of a whole
Pie chart
Treemap
Change Treemap
Look for common words in a text
Tag Cloud
Word Tree (check out the example on the blog - it is beautiful!)
And - you can use your data, or one of the over 6000 existing data sets uploaded by users. Of course, check the uploaded data set for accuracy and authenticity.
Visit Many Eyes and go play with data!
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We say we are preparing students for their future, not our past. Let’s take a look at the future of health care.
St. John Providence Park Hospital, a state-of-the-art facility, is scheduled to open in Novi, Michigan next year. Great Lakes IT Report highlighted its information technology and medical features that will make this facility cutting-edge:
- all drugs ordered via computer (no reading doc’s messy handwriting)
- software to check for drug interaction
- measuring devices with smart sensors in drug pumps
- beds that notify nurses when a patient gets out of bed
- in addition to a traditional ICU unit, 152 of the 182 remaining beds will transition from stepdown, general care, or rehab. No more moving the patient between sections of a facility.
- a “war room” for monitoring patient status
- sophisticated electronic medical records
- all patient rooms are sleepover capable, with flat screen monitors and entertainment options
- ability to isolate the air in sections of the hospital
- several days backup power and water
- wireless personal communicators for staff
- aesthetic architecture that flows with its environment
- and more!
Thinking about CTE, also known as career and technical education. As adults we never had this type of health care experience. Are our classrooms equipped to help our students not only gain the clinical skills but the technology literacy skills they need? In IT we often stress skills, and in addition to the technology-specific skills, our students need to understand the needs and systems of the technology users (in this case, both patients and hospital staff). How can we help our students develop the proficiencies required in a 21st century workplace? This question is especially intriguing if rephrased - How can we help our students develop the proficiencies required in a 21st century workplace from a 20th century classroom, filled with 20th century products, practices and perspectives?
Imagine this world for our students interested in health and IT careers - what an exciting work place!
Preparing our students for their future. How are we doing?
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