Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy is Andrew Churches’ 2008 adaptation of the revised Bloom framework for digital classroom tasks. It does not mean that a named app sits at a cognitive level. The objective, the reasoning required and the assessment criteria set the demand. The tool is only the medium.
This page is the digital-task companion to a beginner introduction and a practical guide. It is personal commentary, not a new official taxonomy. Last reviewed: 30 August 2026.
Who developed it
Benjamin Bloom chaired a committee whose 1956 handbook described educational objectives in the cognitive domain. Later work covered the affective domain. Other authors developed psychomotor accounts. Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl led the 2001 revision. Krathwohl had also worked on the original project, so it is misleading to call both men simply “former students of Bloom”.
Andrew Churches mapped digital activities onto the revised verbs: remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate, create. His contribution was a classroom heuristic for the then-new web, not a replacement of the 2001 knowledge dimension.
How to use it without chasing tools
Ask what the learner must do with knowledge, then pick a durable digital task type. Avoid mapping “Google = remember” or “Wikipedia = apply”. Searching can be recall, or it can be analysis, depending on the question.
| Level | Digital task types that can fit | Safeguard |
|---|---|---|
| Remember | Retrieve a fact from a named source; list; bookmark for later use | Do not require public accounts for basic retrieval |
| Understand | Summarise in own words; tag and group sources; explain a diagram | Check copyright before copying text or images |
| Apply | Use a method in a new example; edit a shared document to a brief | School-approved tools only; no personal data in public wikis |
| Analyse | Compare sources; sort survey or class data; identify bias in a page | Consent before surveying people; no contacting strangers |
| Evaluate | Judge a source against criteria; moderate a comment with a rubric | Age, privacy and school policy before any public critique |
| Create | Produce an original digital artefact that meets a brief | Accessibility, attribution, and no pressure to publish commercially |
Obsolete consumer tools such as Delicious, Google Bookmarks and consumer Skype should not be taught as current practice. If a platform has closed or changed, keep the task type and change the example.
AI in this picture
Generative AI can support drafting, practice questions or feedback sketches at several levels. It does not create a separate “AI taxonomy”, and it does not handle “lower-level” thinking on the learner’s behalf. The tool still does not set the cognitive level. The task does. If the learner only pastes a prompt and submits the output, the cognitive work has not been done. Keep learner data inside approved systems, and require human review of anything that will be marked or published.
If you now want classroom prompts that you check against a real task, use 10 simple prompts for Cambridge teachers.
Related: What is Bloom’s Taxonomy?, question stems, and the practical guide.
Sources
- Bloom, B. S. (ed.) (1956). Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals. Handbook I: Cognitive Domain.
- Anderson, L. W. and Krathwohl, D. R. (eds.) (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing.
- Churches, A. (2008). Bloom’s Digital Taxonomy. Classroom adaptation of the revised taxonomy for digital tasks.
Hi, I was wondering where the image with the circles comes from. Is it your visualization or Churches’? I would like to cite it correctly.
Thanks for the comment Stephanie – please cite this website.
its always good to learn and understand about blooms taxonomy because it helps in making good plans according the class.
I found Bloom’s Taxonomy very helpful in crafting age appropriate lesson plans for my young learners.