Jordan's+Higher-Order+Thinking

Technology is a great way to support higher-order thinking. Higher-order thinking involves students remembering, understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating in order to comprehend lesson materials and knowledge. Technology allows for more abstract thinking from students in a way that may not be result of a traditional classroom (i.e. sitting and listening to a teacher lecture). Students can be interactive with technology and have more control over what they are learning and how they are learning specific topics.

A type of technology that supports higher-order thinking would be a virtual learning experience. A virtual learning experience that I found to be interesting is called the Rare Book Room. This website has compiled numerous authors such as Shakespeare, Benjamin Franklin, Redoute, Galileo, Copernicus, Louis Renard, and writings from the medieval and Renaissance time periods. Each person or topic has a collaboration of famous works from that particular person or time period. Not only does it give students the names of the writings and descriptions, it allows them to click on the writings and see the actual manuscripts from when they were first created. I thought this was a great resource because often times in history classrooms, we learn about specific people and their contributions to society. Often times, these contributions are a revolutionary pieces of writing that defined an era, rebelled against common ideologies, or suggested ideas that changed the ways people and civilizations thought and lived in societies. Since students can read the actual manuscripts, it gives students a realistic view of the original documents. This will help students see important aspects of the document such as reading the actual language from that time, seeing first hand the ideas these authors had, and to take a look at how things were when a particular writing was created. Interpreting the text will be more interesting since students are looking at the actual document.

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