week 5

This week in reading about bloom's taxonomy, I learned his theory on how different types of thinking and questions correlate to teach at certain levels. Blooms theory can be seen in a pyramid shape that corresponds to having Knowledge on the bottom with Evaluation at the top of the pyramid. This pyramid is supposed to help teachers create better questions that make students think deeper. The taxonomy shows a list of word in each category that apply to that level of thinking- such as under the Analyze category, words that correspond to it are categorize, compare, contrast. These different levels of thinking will help teachers to make a larger variation in questions such as simple recall, as well as, utilizing these different categories to engage the students. This theory is exploring a range of cognitive processes that are used.
I like that this type of categorization helps to explore different aspects of the reading or activity that is taking place. I remember having to do flow charts or posters to reiterate what was going on in the stories. I liked having more interactive activities than simple recall of facts that are going on. The questions that ask to evaluate or how I would feel about a certain instance in the story would be more interesting and perhaps make the book feel more personal. Using higher level questions mixed in with lower level could help keep tests and activities more interesting as well as challenging.

This week after learning and personally utilizing Powerpoint, there are many highly applicable uses as a teacher to help yourself as well as the student. Using powerpoint as a teacher can keep lectures on track and organized. Powerpoint allows the teacher to be able to face and engage the classroom at all times. Whereas previously, writing on the overhead projector took time and having your head face down as you are writing. Powerpoint is also more exciting for the student because it can be a good learning tool for different learning types. Having ideas bulleted while the teacher lecture facilitates note taking and the ability to do two things at once. Powerpoint oculd be used by the teacher to show how research can be done and put into a concise form to present to the students. Moreover, the Poewrpoint is an effective tool for the students to have to organize reports and learn to do presentations in front of groups of people. Having the students do group projects and using Powerpoint to organize and reflect on their topic is also a helpful learning tool.