As D-Term approaches, we know that many of you are working on revamping your Syllabi. One of the areas on your syllabus that you may be looking at is the course objective section. Course objectives are a great way for us to communicate our expectations to the students while providing guidance for the direction of the class. Many people follow the ABCD method of building course objectives. Using this method instructors define their Audience, detail the Behavior that they would like that audience to be able to perform following instruction under specified Conditions to a certain Degree. For example, an objective for this blog post might be:
Following reading, Audience Members will be able to state the four parts of the ABCD method 100% of the time.
One of the most important parts of your objective is the Condition and the verb used as part of this condition. Often times these verbs come directly from the list of Bloom’s Taxonomy and Bloom’s Verbs. Blooms taxonomy defines six levels of thinking. These levels are typically grouped as the LOTs or Lower Order Thinking skills (Knowledge, Comprehension, Application) and the HOTs or Higher Order Thinking Skills (Analysis, Synthesis, Evaluation). For a list of Bloom’s Verbs please see this short resource: http://www.teach-nology.com/worksheets/time_savers/bloom/
However, you may have noticed that these verbs do not take into account many of our new 21st century digital literacy skills. That’s where Andrew Churches comes in. Churches published a revision to Bloom’s Taxonomy called Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy includes new verbs that have emerged as a direct result of digital media in the classroom. For example at the Analysis stage in the taxonomy, new verbs include: Mashing, Linking, Reverse-engineering, Cracking, Media clipping and Mind-mapping. Check out Blooms Digital Taxonomy on Andrew Churches site: http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+Digital+Taxonomy.
With the help of this site, you’ll be able to mash up your resources into a great visualization tool for bookmarking your learning objectives!!