The Art of Complex Problem Solving. Rhetological Fallacies. Bloom’s Thinking Skills ≠ Apps. I’ve been researching Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy of Cognitive Tasks, and I’ve been seeing a number of guides attempt to match iPad apps with each level in Bloom’s hierarchy.
These app guides seem built on a false assumption that using a certain app will reliably stimulate a certain mode of thinking. I think equating apps with Bloom’s thinking tasks create the false impression that if you have all the right apps, your students can just click their way to critical thinking. To be generous, you definitely could use many of these apps to exhibit the qualities of thinking Bloom describes, just as you could do with paper and pencil, a Word doc, a microphone, a camera, or a PowerPoint. The problem, of course, is that you can also successfully use those apps without exhibiting any of the desired thinking skills.
The worst case scenario, of course, is that you squander valuable class time (and money!) Thinking Hats.