Higher order thinking with Technology

I have been wanting to upgrade my blog to wordpress V2 but I haven’t got the courage to do it as I am too scared 18 months of blogging will disappear!! Anyone got any ideas on how it can be done easily? I have been using wordpress version 2.whatever for some projects at work and think it is great.

I have been on the road quite a bit lately, working with different schools and presenting to principals in New Zealand. I get to do a lot of thinking while on the road, but very rarely get to write or post anything worthwhile on the blog. I have been interested to read a number of articles recently about how we need to teach kids to think with higher order thinking skills. I have linked to a particular article I read some time ago from the Melbourne age. Some ideas on how technology can help students to develop these higher order thinking skills….

1) I think we need to see students learn through discovery. Allowing them to experiment and have a go at something. Letting them work out how to get something to work or solve a problem. Students traditionally don’t like reading instructions, which is not such a bad thing as the problem can still be solved through experimenting and trial and error. Hopefully, students will learn that instructions are there to make the process easier and quicker, however, I don’t believe following instructions actually develops higher order thinking skills. These skills are developed when the student is made to think through ideas and concepts that will all work together to solve a problem. For example, why do we think we need to teach students how to use a software package? Why not tell the students to produce example ‘A’ using software ‘B’ by the end of the lesson by experimenting with the software. Some students will go straight to the help menu, but in my experience many will click around the screen trying different things. Many of them are accessing prior knowledge of other applications they have learnt and are attempting to apply it to a new situation. Unfortunately, schools are too busy to allow the time for this type of learning to take place. I think our prep teachers got it right when they integrate such a high level of experimental play into the curriculum. This is actually the beginnings of higher order thinking skills.

2) Writing with technology has recently lent itself very nicely to having students higher order thinking skills developed. When students are introduced to the world of blogging they are launching themselves into a whole new audience. They have a new audience to write for, it is not a traditional audience, in fact there are new skills required to write to a global social network audience. Students need to apply what they know about writing to different audiences and almost create an appropriate genre for their blogging. If the engagement and interaction with the audience is happening, hopefully students will be challenged by their readers to, apply, justify, and reason their thoughts. I use to write comments back to students that would challenge their opinions – Basically, inviting or requesting further justification.

3) Simulation is a powerful learning tool that I believe is not harnessed enough in learning. Technology allows us the ability to simulate an event with all the required parameters with out too much trouble. A basic example of this is sim-city or rollercoaster tycoon. I had students last year that were hooked on these types of games. I believe with very little guidance from the teacher students can begin to analyse their strategies for the game or for particular parts of the game and then see if they can improve their strategy. Future lab in the UK has some wonderful examples of this with the use of GPS technology and a simulated African wildlife adventure.

Just a few thoughts that I have finally got down here. It is interesting to note that while we have so many experts calling for students to be taught to be critical and higher order thinkers we have an education world that is speeding toward standardised testing that does not test these skills in a manner that is at all accurate for a 21st century world. We have the research and the skills from quite old research such as Bloom, Gardner etc, however we have policy makers that believe we can assertain the brilliance of students for the world they moving into by making them sit tests.