Opening up higher thinking with the help of technology

How can technology help develop higher order thinking and problem solving skills?  The articles posted on education-world.com and educscapes.com gave many ideas and links to great web tools that can be used in the classroom.  

Bloom's taxonomy outlines levels of intellectual behavior in learning.  The levels in this taxonomy are:

knowledge

comprehension

application

analysis, synthesis, and evaluation.

The metaphor of a Russian matrioshka doll is helpful.  Beginning with the big idea (the largest doll) is knowledge.  Each intellectual level becomes more specific, similar to the dolls getting smaller as each piece is opened.  The final piece is evaluation, which is very focussed and specific.  Each piece fits together for greater understanding, but the process of higher thinking is like taking apart the doll and discovering more depth through the process.

The articles on education-world and eduscapes provide links to several great tools that children can use to explore their knowledge and help develop higher level thinking and problem solving skills.  There are sights for creating surveys and graphs. These could be great tools to analyze, synthesize and evaluate math and science knowledge.  There are history sights that provide short movies that can bring a historical episode to life.  

I'm helping sixth graders who have studied ancient Greek history and architecture to build their own temple on an interactive web quest through the British Museum.  They are synthesizing the knowledge that's been introduced.  It's effective and so much fun for them.

While exploring several of the links provided on education-world and eduscapes, I found myself bothered by the pop up ads.  This is one pitfall of using free educational websites in the classroom.  The ads which are designed to grab a person's attention serve their purpose.  They are very distracting and in some cases very disruptive.  Even so, the resources available because of technology provide valuable connections for children who thrive on variety in how material is presented.