Sometimes I find quality resources online, but they are just shy of the rigor I want in my classroom. Sometimes the exact opposite happens. When I feel the need to adjust the rigor of an assignment, I often refer to Bloom’s taxonomy as a guide of how to scaffold the practice. I need to make sure my students can master the content at the knowledge level (on Bloom’s) with verbs like “recall,” “identify,” or “state” before I push them to an application or evaluation level with verbs like “interpret,” “defend,” or “assess.” For many teachers, it becomes difficult to find the time to do all of this. Finding something that gives me quality content and also allows me to easily adapt it to my class is crucial. Edcite allows teachers to find resources in our libraries and customize them to the desired rigor.
If I were looking at this Short Story in the Edcite Assignments Library, I might notice that the first question immediately jumps to an open response that assesses the student’s comprehension level. On the Bloom’s Taxonomy, that would be skipping the knowledge level of questioning. In some of my classes that jump is perfectly fine, however in others, I need more scaffolding. In order to ensure the appropriate scaffolding for some of my classes, I adapted that original short story assignment to include more guidance: Short Story (More Guided). I also knew that sometimes my class was in a place where we needed to push the critical thinking more and add more questions at the evaluation level. I adapted that same short story here to include more higher level questioning.
Customization is useful not only for adapting content to my classroom, but can also be used to make the content more engaging for my students! Check back tomorrow for the next post in our Customization Series: Make it Relate!
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