Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy - by Anne Queiroz

What is Bloom’s Taxonomy?

We learned that Bloom’s Taxonomy is a classification system to explain and distinguish different levels of human cognition. Bloom’s Taxonomy was originally published in 1956 by a team of cognitive psychologists at the university of Chicago. It is named after the committee’s chairman, Benjamin Bloom (1913-1999). Educators have primarily focused on the Cognitive model, which includes six different classification levels:

• Knowledge
• Comprehension
• Application
• Analysis
• Synthesis
• Evaluation

The group wanted to design a logical framework for teaching and learning goals that would help researchers and educators understand the fundamental ways in which people acquire and develop new  knowledge, skills, and understandings. In the beginning it was used in order to help academics avoid duplicative or redundant efforts in developing different tests to measure the same objectives.

Some changes

In 2001, another team of scholars released a revised version of Bloom’s taxonomy in order to be  more useful to educators and to reflect the common ways in which it had come to be used in schools.

In the revised version, three categories were renamed and all of them were expressed as verbs rather than nouns.

• Knowlegde became Remembering
• Comprehension became Understanding
• Synthesis became Creating

In addition, Creating became the highest level in the classification system, switching places with Evaluating. The revised version is now:

• Remembering
• Understanding
• Applying
• Analyzing
• Evaluating
• Creating

Bloom’ s Digital Taxonomy 

It is an attemp to account for the new behaviours, actions and learning opportunities emerging as technology advances ( Churches, 2007). Because of the huge amount of digital tools, educators find themselves confused about which ones they should use with their students and how they can learn it. Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy facilitates the educator’s work by showing some possible ways to be successfull when trying to use them.