Bloom's Digital Taxonomy in the Saudi EFL Classrooms

Bloom's Taxonomy is a classification of the objectives of education, it divides them into three domains;  Cognitive, Affective, and Psychomotor. The goal of Bloom's Taxonomy is to motivate educators to focus on all three domains, creating a more holistic form of education. The first domain is about knowing, memorizing, and a lot of highlighting. Most of our schools here in Saudi Arabia are emphasizing the skills in this domain. The second domain which is the Affective domain; includes the manner in which we deal with things emotionally, such as feelings, values, appreciation, enthusiasms, motivations, and attitudes. The skills in the Psychomotor domain are describing students' physical ability to use tools and instruments.

Lorin Anderson was a student of Bloom, in the 1990s he led a team of cognitive psychologists to revise Bloom's Taxonomy, and in 2001 he published Bloom's Revised Taxonomy. The revised version has verbs instead of nouns, and changed in the arrangement of the sequence within the taxonomy.

Bloom's Taxonomy can help in developing students' critical thinking skills by moving up to the higher order thinking skills which is can be done by:
Applying: Teacher can give the students a real life problematic situation and ask them to solve it, or simply gives them a story and ask them to predict what would happen next?
Analyzing: It can be achieved by encouraging the students to conduct an interview or a survey or having them to make a chart, family tree or diagrams.
Evaluating: A teacher can make use of the previous information to accomplish more complex ones by asking them to give good reasons to justify a given issue or to write a persuasive essay.
Creating: It can be achieved by having the student to create a new plan or simply improve an existing one.
These higher order thinking skills, providing the educator with suggestions and ideas to help them to develop their students' critical thinking skills.

Bloom's Taxonomy is not very evident in the Saudi EFL classroom, we would see a lot of questions based on the lower order ( Remembering and Understanding ) but, there is almost no higher order skills in the Saudi EFL classroom. Saudi students used to learn by cramming and that's all! They don't evaluate or create any thing till they reach their college level and that's so wrong because it kills the creativity in the student and teach them to be dependent on their teachers to learn! Students should be asked to be creative and to be independent learners, and that's what Bloom's Taxonomy guarantee, lifelong learning. As a teacher I will try my best to use every thing possible to encourage my students to be productive, creative, and independent learners so, I guess I'm going to use Bloom's Taxonomy to help me to achieve my goals.

Evaluating Websites

We have chosen a website for English Language Teaching (ELT) for teachers and students also. The website is (http://www.pearsonelt.com).It is a Commercial Site. It is the new home for great teachers. The Authority is for Pearson Education Limited, a registered company in England and Wales. They get to work in lots of different classrooms around the world, from Asia to Latin America, from every day stat schools to privet language schools (PLS). They help the teachers and the students across the world to learn, teach and practice their English skills by looking for combining content, assessment, technology and services every day. This site has free resources for teachers and students to use at home independently. The resources have been created and developed by professionals who worked to design this site to support teachers and help them enjoy their work and improve their potential, their teaching, and further their career. In addition, it is helpful for EFL teachers and students to engage online presentation to help them learn in a fun and interesting way.  The purpose of this website is clear which is being able to improve the teachers' way of teaching English at any level (Primary, Teen , Tertiary)   and have fun in the same time. It has advertisements, which are related to the site and does not have an advertisement that might distract  from  the purpose for visiting. This website have some suitable graphic related to its content. Contact information is listed and there is no dead links (they are well chosen by the author of this website, and they work correctly). It helps students improving their 4 skills in EFL and for teachers also. It has lots of resources online, interactive activities, supplementary materials (at the highest quality, which enable the teachers and the students to achieve their English learning and teaching goals), course test, guides for teachers and useful web links which are reliable. They can share this web site on Facebook and Twitter. They can contact with author to comment or suggest anything they want. There you can communicate with others to response to any article or discussion. There are no misspellings or grammatical errors; everything is well written by the author of this website. You can choose the text size you want to make it clear and easy to read. The choice of website color is nice and attractive.  The style of the page is so professional and well organized, that   has   different sections with different topics. As a result, we found that the website was beneficial, interesting, and easy for both teachers and students. Pearson   website has make this website accessible for all users. The website provides the ability to search  the content. It can be loaded quickly and move around it easily. There is also a site map, which makes browsing the site is very easy

This web site is helpful for English language teachers and students. As a result , we found that this web site is very beneficial , interesting and easy to use it .

Wordle in Edu401

The role of WebQuests in Learning a Foreign/second Language

Reading about WebQuest besides what we read earlier in this course, made me feel ashamed of how primitive is our educational system. Because I haven't even heard about a teacher using  any of the technologies and techniques we learnt, in her classroom. I couldn't find an excuse for not using the Internet and Web to enhance the educational process at our schools till now.

Understanding what a WebQuest is, took me a while, because it was totally a new thing. It also seemed vague for me at the beginning but, different samples made it easier and simpler. WebQuest is difind as " an inquiry oriented activity in which some or all of the information that learners interact with comes from resources on the internet, optionally supplemented with videoconferencing." The role of the teacher is either to bring the students an already-made WebQuest, or to design her own. The students are usually working in groups to complete the WebQuest assignment. They follow the instructions given in the WebQuest, so they can finish it the right way.

-  As a student, I always find it useless to study things that are not relevant to my life, things that turn me off and make me bored and frustrated just by reading their topics, things like King Abdul-Aziz air port, or History of Saudi Arabia or Oil !!
- I don't see that the educational process should be boring and killing the students slowly in order to be successful, I think that we can be creative in delivering the information we expect our students to learn. As I always say, it's not about the fact or the piece of information, it's about how we present it.
- We don't expect our students to be like the previous ones, so we need to develop our techniques accordingly.
Based on what I mentioned above, I think I'm going to use anything that take my students' needs and wants into account. So, yes I'm definitely going to use WebQuest quite often, if it works with my students.

How Would English Language Teachers Use Blogs, Wikis and Delicious With their Students?

I tried to figure out an activity that combines all of these social networking web-sites. Because I think every networking site has a special characteristic that we can't find in the other, so why we don't use them to complete one another, wiki gives us a great characteristic that is, it's so flexible  we can easily edit and add or remove things, it's great in dealing with large classes. Delicious is a bookmarking website, that we can use it to share references and sources where our students can find them easily by using the key words or labels. Finally, blog is a personal site, that any individual can uses it for posting his/her opinion on something or writing about things happening around.

English language teacher can use them in an assignment that asking the students to go to Delicious and find the shared link titled with " English language level test " or " Test your reading skills" , take the test.. then ask them to take a screenshot and share it on their wikis, then ask them to discuss and describe how easy or difficult it was?, when they felt like struggling?, what were the difficulties they've faced?,and have they enjoyed doing it?, all on their own words. Later on she can make a list on wiki and arrange them according to their marks on the test to create a competition atmosphere.

The Possiblity of Reaching Bax’s Normilasation in our national context: Why is it possible?When is it possible ?How will it be reached?

Stephan Bax argues that, "Our aim should be to attain a state of `normalisation' in which the technology is invisible and truly integrated"

In his research, bax argued that we should set " normalization " as a goal to be achieved. That using the technology is invisible and hardly even recognized as a technology. According to Bax, we can achieve normalization if, teachers and students use technologies without being afraid of inhibition. They will be completely integrated into all other aspects of Classroom-life, alongside course-books, teachers and notepads. They will go almost unnoticed. When the needs of learners will be carefully analysed first of all, and then the computer used to serve those needs. He suggested to plan for this normalised state and then move towards it.

Bax set some agenda for the future of CALL which are, identifying the criterial factors which normalisation requires. Auditing the practice of each teaching context in the light of these criteria. And finally, adjusting our current practice in each aspect so as to encourage normalisation.

CALL normalization could be achieved in Saudi Arabia in the nearly future, because socially we are almost there, you can find even 3 or 4 years old child is using his I-pod or I-pad and surfing the internet playing online games, but for education it's still retroactive, even phones are prohibited!! But there is some hope that these rules going to be changed gradually, the students and teachers are capable to use technology  they only need to be educated how to use it for education. What we need is the ministry administration desire. If the admins are willing to move toward normalisation, it won't take us so long to change.

 Designing  programs that fill into students needs and the cultural aspects and the Islamic rules would be strongly required.

 Also, educating the students that technology could be helpful in the learning process is required.

Teachers must know that technology is not always something for fun, it could be more educating even than books. Also that, it's strengthen the relation between the teacher and his/her students since s/he can be connected to them.

                                          Hi all, welcome to my blog. Enjoy