Assessment Reflection 1

The task this week, required all students to contribute to the online wiki about our thoughts on the use of mobile phones in the classroom, scaffolded by de Bono’s 6 thinking hats. My first reaction to having mobile phones in the classroom was an immediate ‘NO!’ So the black hat was a great place to start I could easily list multiple negatives about distractions and dangers, as seen in my responses below.

http://debonoshats.wikispaces.com/de+Bono+14

Scaffolding this activity with de Bono’s six thinking hats was a very effective strategy, if merely asked to give an opinion on the ideas of mobile phones in classrooms there would be some strong opinions and not necessarily a lot of thinking. It’s very easy to tell people what you think and know about a topic, but to analyse and evaluate it from different perspectives requires a much higher level of processing.

De Bono’s 6 thinking hats are a very effective tool for developing higher order thinking skills. The green creative hat can easily be linked to Bloom’s Taxonomy level to Create, also the blue and white hats of process and objective clearly link to the level of analysing and finally the black (negative), red (intuitive) and yellow (positive) hats connect to Bloom’s Evaluate.

Analyse Separates material or concepts into component parts so that its organizational structure may be understood. Distinguishes between facts and inferences.	Evaluate Make judgments about the value of ideas or materials.	Create Builds a structure or pattern from diverse elements. Put parts together to form a whole, with emphasis on creating a new meaning or structure.
Blue hat - The Process: Where are we now? What is the next step? Where have we been? What sort of thinking is needed? White hat - Information: What information do I have? What are the facts? What information do I need? What do I want to KNOW?	Black hat - Judgement: What is wrong with this? Why will this not work? Is this safe? Can this be done? Yellow hat - Benefits: What are the good points? Why can this be successful? Why is this a good thing? Red hat - Feelings: How do I feel about this? What do I like about the idea? What don't I like about the idea?	Green hat - Creativity: What new ideas are possible with this? What is my suggestion for success? Can I create something new?

The wiki worked as an effective tool for this activity, it allowed for collaborative learning as I read and responded to different peoples’ ideas and thoughts. Through maintaining an open mind I was able to see all the different possibilities for mobile phones in classrooms where I would not have thought of on my own. Through using an activity such as this in the classroom students could all be given an opportunity to share their thoughts and absorb others’ ideas. Learners have a large array of knowledge if we just provided them with a non-judgemental place to share it, where all beliefs are considered important.

I believe that the learning occurring during this wiki (or any one you may conduct in your classroom) comes very much from the social constructivism learning theory. Social Constructivism believes that learning is founded upon social interactions within a learning community which is precisely what this task was about, pooling together everyone’s knowledge, in order to support and learn from each other. 

To help my understanding of social constructivism I found this glog on social constructivism to make it a little clearer (and more fun).

The image below has been draw from the moodle site and shows how this activity provides clear links to the social constructivism theory. There was a scaffold of de Bono’s thinking hats to  support our complex reasoning, all contributions to the wiki were valued by others, thinking was clearly visible and permanent on the wiki.

http://moodle.cqu.edu.au/mod/page/view.php?id=146071

Overall I feel that the engagement activity was very successful in beginning to develop our higher order thinking skills and ability to in turn help students develop these skills, through the use of ICT.