Last week I had a long meeting with our R&D Coordinator, Scot Hoffman, as we are putting together a Multimedia Project Guide and Planner for Teachers. Although we initially started talking about Bloom's Taxonomy and how our aim is to help teachers plan multimedia projects that will facilitate higher level thinking in students, we quickly moved away from that and started to talk about the 21st century skills identified by ASB as being critical for our students' futures. These are:
- creativity and innovation
- critical thinking
- information fluency
- managing complexity
- multicultural literacy
At the same time we wanted to incorporate the work that Bernajean Porter has been doing with our teachers and students about rigor and craftsmanship. As teachers work through the planner we want them to consider the learning goals so that students make meaning before they make media. We want teachers to consider the type of communication that will be most effective for students having a desired impact on their audience. We then want teachers to consider jointly with students the mode of communication that allows the chosen media to best work together and tools that they can use to create their product. All of this has to happen before production and publishing.
As we were dissatisfied with using a graphic of Bloom's Taxonomy when we feel we have already moved way beyond this, I have started to create a new graphic that will combine our 21st century skills with the process we want students to go through when creating multimedia. I'm posting this graphic below and would love feedback from anyone who is also trying to help teachers plan for developing both the multimedia craftsmanship skills and 21st century skills in students.