Week 2: de Bono's Hats

After attempting and completing the de Bono’s Hats/Mobile phones Wikispace activity, it became very clear to me as to why the information within the course materials, course readings and activities were provided. Not only were the course activities relevant to the whole course (Digital Pedagogies in Secondary Schools) itself, but I believe that they gave me the insight and foundations I needed to be able to answer the chosen question through  de Bono’s Hat activity. One example of this can be seen throughout Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy activity within topic 2. Based on my understanding of Bloom’s Cognitive Taxonomy was that it was used as a way to develop and support different types of thinking and questioning to develop a higher order of thinking. This was achieved by learners analysing, evaluating and synthesising concepts or processes. Based on this, I believe that the same method was incorporated into de Bono’s Hats activity as each different coloured hat had me evaluating, analysing and synthesising the same question just in a different perspective. Having said this I also believe that the learning theory and pedagogy that was based around the wikispace activity was re-enforced through Bloom’s Taxonomy as in order to promote and achieve higher order thinking the processes again of evaluating and analysing needed to be developed and scaffolded. This was certainly done within the wikispace activity as the course materials gave the needed scaffolding to complete the task at hand. Due to this scaffolding I was able to achieve many learning outcomes. These include:

o   Being able to identify different ways of thinking and different perspectives to the same question

o    Understand and reflecting on the wikispace question by involving the process of high order thinking, and

o   Identify both the positives and negatives associated with mobile phones within classroom settings.

Overall based on the learning design of the wikispace activity, by incorporating the course materials, readings and activities as scaffolds to complete the Bono’s Hats activity I believe that it added an extra understanding on how to complete or how to go about completing the given task. Therefore I believe that the learning design of this activity was very interesting, useful and one learning design to keep in mind that could later benefit my own style of teaching.