Using a SmartBoard for Higher Level Thinking Skills
by Langwitches ~ January 20th, 2009. Filed under: Professional Development, SmartBoard.
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The topic of our monthly Technology Professional Development workshop was Using your SmartBoard for Higher Level Thinking Skills.
I started out by revisiting the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy for the 21st Century, pointing out that “Create” had been added as the highest level of thinking skills.
Then I showed the video of “Pay Attention” which provided a great link from the taxonomy to why we need to change the way we have been teaching for years.
Why not use the technology that our students love to create more effectively?
Why not use the technology that our students love to engage more effectively?
Why not use the technology that our students love to teach more effectively?
I had copies prepared of the taxonomy cycle below and asked teachers to look especially at the “Create” section. What are some activities they could think of that involved products that foster and address these thinking skills?
Found on the American Psychological Association’s
Based on: Clark, B. (2002). Growing up gifted: Developing the potential of children at home and at school. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Merrill Prentice Hall.
We then looked at a visual, that I adapted from content on Technofrustration or Joy. My colleague Katie Bennett came up with the idea of the images of three benches.
- The Novice bench is frozen, cold and in the snow
- The Intermediate bench looks into the sunrise of a new day with all its possibilities.
- The Advance bench allows you to enjoy the summer day and bathe in the sunshine of a calm and serene surrounding.
I especially liked:
Shifting from seeing the SmartBoard as a teaching tool towards the SmartBoard as a learning tool.
Before allowing teachers to break off into groups, I showed two Notebook examples files of how to allow students to:
- predict
- imagine
- hypothesize
- role-play
- invent
The first one was from Matt Mikhail, which I found through SmartBoard Lessons Podcast:
The other one I created as an example simply was a storyboard with a background and a few animal characters (objects) placed on it.
Make this storyboard interactive, by allowing students to “create” their own story.Allow them to manipulative the objects.
- Why is the bear in the forest?
- What would happen if the parrot flew around the bear?
- Would the bear try to eat it?
- What would happen if the penguins crossed the bear’s path?
- Is that even possible?
- Lessons on habitat, food chain, fantasy/fiction vs. reality, etc.
- Let students manipulate the story by adding, deleting and changing variables.
- What if the lion and the bear meet? What if it is a baby bear? What if the lion is an old lion?
- Ask questions, such as I wonder… What if… How about… let students come up with their own answers.
- Let them evaluate and decide what happens next.
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January 20th, 2009 at 8:06 pm
The process of thinking how to use an Interactive WhiteBoard effectively is one I consistently think about. As a visual learner, I particularly enjoyed your use of the three benches. It helped me follow the pedagogy discussion immediately after these images. Thanks for helping me think again of how an IWB can go from a Teaching Tool to a Learning Tool.
January 20th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
Excellent post! Thank you for sharing. This is going straight into my del.icio.us bookmarks.
January 22nd, 2009 at 1:25 pm
This sounds a lot like the new digital blooms taxonomy where they adapted the bloom’s tax to all the new 21st century digital skills. Check it out I blogged it at
http://edvibes.blogspot.com/2009/01/blooms-digital-taxonomy.html
January 26th, 2009 at 2:35 am
Thank you for sharing your entire workshop. I have been struggling to plan just such an workshop. My teachers have been asking how to pull in higher order thinking. It is so easy to use the board as an expensive mouse or glorified projector; they wanted to have their own thinking pushed. You’ve made it much easier for me to do just that.
January 26th, 2009 at 6:45 am
@Susan,
I am glad the workshop notes are useful to you. Looking forward to hearing/reading about your experience. The most I struggle with is to “wake” teachers up with the awareness that they are not using the IWB to its most potential. Most of them feel that using it as a “mouse” and “glorified whiteboard” is integrating technology.
January 26th, 2009 at 5:15 pm
Readers of this post may be interested in Instructional Design for Interactive Whiteboards. This is a free, self-paced, online course provided by SMART Technologies.
Register through SMART’s training site: http://smarttech.com/trainingcenter/LMS.asp
February 1st, 2009 at 4:31 am
[...] Langwitches » Using a SmartBoard for Higher Level Thinking Skills [...]
September 25th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
Thank you for the specific examples of leading students through higher-level thinking activities. Having a single SMART Board as a focal point in a class is not enough, and with posts (and workshops) like this you’re taking the use of the SMART Board to higher ground.
I’m intrigued with the possibilities that a SMART Board and SMART Notebook offer in the way of scaffolded activity structures, particularly with collaborative learning activities that integrate higher-level thinking, creative thinking, and/or problem solving. The board doesn’t become the focal point for the entire full-class lesson, but instead is the ‘compass’ for activities which go from full-class to collaborative group activities. Since integrating these types of practices independently can be challenging for many teachers, having these activities scaffolded into a SMART Notebook file that they can pull out of their toolbox and refer back to at any point seems like a good idea – one I’m hoping to explore further and one I was hoping you might have thoughts and/or experiences with. Thanks again! I’m one of your latest Twitter followers @langwitches!