Introduction to Pedagogical Tools

Video Transcription

Hello, and thank you for joining me for an introduction to pedagogical tools. Today's essential questions are, what are some digital tools I can use in my classroom, and what are some instructional planning tools I can use in my classroom?

Today's focus is on digital and instructional planning tools that we can use to enhance our instruction in a K through 12 classroom. Please keep in mind, there are many digital tools that we can use, but we're going to focus on Digital Bloom's Taxonomy, the SAMR Model, Understanding by Design, and Essential Learning Questions.

First, we're going to look at Digital Blooms. So most educators are familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy. Bloom's Taxonomy goes from knowledge to evaluation and hits everywhere in between. So it's knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

At the lower level, or the orange, you have what's called lower order thinking skills. This is just kind of repeating back to the teacher what they've been taught. As you go up the pyramid, you reach higher order thinking skills. And evaluating is when students are really making decisions about their learning and taking more ownership of it. And this is a higher order thinking skill.

Digital Blooms is arranged in much of the same way. It goes from remembering to creation, and it's a hierarchy of technology skills and knowledge. Digital Blooms is important because it accounts for the technology that's available for a 21st century classroom. And regular Bloom's Taxonomy doesn't account for this. So it's a really useful tool.

Next, we have SAMR, sam-r. The SAMR Model is a framework for integrating technology in the classroom. It starts with substitution, then goes to augmentation, then modification, and redefinition. We'll talk about what those mean later. But it's important to know that teachers may begin at the lower level, which involves simply substituting technology for another activity, then move towards the higher levels, which involve redefining learning by creating new tasks in order to transform teaching and learning.

So SAMR is really all about, how can I incorporate technology in my classroom? It starts with just substituting maybe a pen and paper with a word processor, and it moves towards redefinition, which is creating a lesson plan around the technology. So it's not acting as a substitute but as something that's actually informing our lesson plan development.

So we're going to take a minute to reflect on some questions. The first question is, which component of the SAMR method am I currently using? Next, I want you to think about what level of Digital Blooms are my students currently using in the classroom. Feel free to refer back to the slides for a reminder of what these are.

Let's move on to some of the instructional planning strategies. First, we have Understanding by Design. This is also sometimes called Backwards Design. And this is where teachers identify an instructional goal or goals, then they consider assessments, both summative and formative, that the class will do to show mastery of the goals. And then they create the learning plans.

This framework was developed in the late 1990s by Jay McTighe and Grant Wiggins. It just really forces teachers to be intentional about what they're doing and think about where they want their students to end up at the end of the unit before planning the unit so that it's a very transparent path that the students are taking.

Next, we have Essential Learning Questions. And Essential Learning Questions were originally designed for use in the Understanding by Design framework. But they are evidenced in many well-designed instructional planning. This type of question gets at the big picture. And it's usually open-ended questions that promote discourse and support the broad instructional goals and standards for the unit or lesson.

Let's take another minute to reflect about the instructional planning tools we've just discussed. Let's begin by thinking about how we've used Understanding by Design in our planning. I'm sure we've done it. We just maybe didn't have a name for it. So now that you know what it is and what the steps are, have you used it? Next, let's put to work Essential Questions and generate one essential question for the current unit you're teaching.

To review, today, we talked about what some of the digital tools are that we can use in our classroom, including Digital Blooms and SAMR. And we also talked about what some instructional planning tools are that we can use, including Understanding by Design and Essential Questions. We'll talk more in depth about these topics in future tutorials.

For more information on how to apply what you learned in this video, please view the Additional Resources section that accompanies this video presentation. The Additional Resources section includes hyperlinks useful for applications of the course material, including a brief description of each resource. Thank you for joining me today. And happy teaching.