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"Elementary school teachers were much less likely than secondary teachers to be frequent technology users; 15 percent of elementary teachers were frequent users and 43 percent were infrequent users, compared with 27 percent and 29 percent of secondary teachers, respectively. Among secondary teachers, social studies teachers were most likely to be frequent technology users (33 percent), while English teachers were least likely (16 percent)." -via Jennifer Dorman

Lesson Grade Level Chart Which lessons are appropriate for your students? All schools are probably teaching many of the information literacy skills found in this body of lessons. Usually, individual teachers will tackle the process of plugging the gaps in their curriculum when an issue or opportunity arises. A sixth grade teacher may see the need to review note taking, while a high school teacher needs to re-introduce Boolean operators and review Citing Sources. Eventually, schools and districts will attempt to make sure the skills covered in these lessons are integrated into the K-12 curriculum. As a teacher, you can begin by looking at the chart below to see which lessons are appropriate for the age and abilities of the students you teach.

Mike Fisher, an instructional coach and education consultant, has created an interesting wiki called Visual Blooms. Visual Blooms inserts web resources into the hierarchical categories of Bloom's Taxonomy. Web resources are placed into the categories of remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating. For example, Delicious is placed in the remembering category while VoiceThread is placed in the creating category. Thanks to Beth Still for sharing the link to Visual Blooms on Twitter.

Whenever the "new blooms" gets mentioned I get the impression that people jump to the creation part as the immediate goal for any lesson. Those levels should always be stressed as developmental stages. Where as I understand how each of those tools fit neatly into the categories, I believe they are more powerful if you can guide the user through each of the developmental stages using one tool. Imagine teaching to remember using Voicethread. Continuing on through evaluating others Voicethreads. Then taking the students to create their own. It makes the pyramid more powerful. :-)

We hear a lot about the 21st century learner - but what about the 21st century teacher? Andrew Churches investigates what makes them succeed. What are the characteristics we would expect to see in a successful 21st century educator? Well, we know they are student-centric, holistic, and they're teaching about how to learn as much as teaching about the subject area. We know, too, that