About & Guide - Bloom's stAIrcase

1. About This Site

Generative AI arrived in classrooms faster than most institutions could respond. Faculty were left to figure it out individually, often without the time, the frameworks, or the empowerment to experiment carefully. We built Bloom's stAIrcase to close this gap.

This site combines two well-established frameworks — Anderson and Krathwohl's revision of Bloom's Taxonomy and Dr. Kara Kennedy's AI Literacy Framework — into an interactive resource that helps faculty design AI-integrated activities grounded in pedagogical theory rather than trend. Whether you're AI-curious or AI-skeptical, we've tried to make a space where you can think carefully about what role AI should play in your students' learning.

Bloom's stAIrcase is built and maintained by Brigette Meskell, MLIS and Nicole Baker, MSED, MSLIS. The site is open-access and licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.

2. How to Use This Site

This site has four main areas.

Explore the visual diagram The homepage shows Bloom's Taxonomy as a clickable diagram: four Knowledge Dimensions (Factual, Conceptual, Procedural, Metacognitive) crossed with six Cognitive Processes (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, Create). Each intersection holds a verb describing what students do at that level click any square to see example activities and AI literacy connections. Start exploring.
Browse the AI Literacy Framework Our adapted version of Dr. Kara Kennedy's seven-competency framework for AI literacy. Click any competency to learn what it includes and why it matters. View the framework.
Design an activity Our Activity Designer walks you through a structured form about your course, students, and goals, then generates a comprehensive prompt you can use to start an iterative interaction with your preferred AI tool. Try the Activity Designer.
Browse and submit activities Once you've designed an activity, consider submitting it so other educators can benefit. The All Activities page collects community submissions organized by discipline and Bloom's classification. See all activities.
Share your feedback Tried something on the site? Have suggestions? Tell us — feedback shapes how the site evolves and may be featured alongside activities you've used.

Accessibility note: Every interactive element on this site is keyboard-navigable and screen-reader-accessible. If you prefer a non-visual alternative to the main diagram, we've built an accessible table view that contains the same content in a screen-reader-optimized format.

3. Using Bloom's Taxonomy for AI Activity Design

If AI is already changing what's possible in learning, then we need different ways to think about where and how AI should show up in our courses. Bloom's Taxonomy, especially as revised by Anderson and Krathwohl in 2001, gives us a map for that thinking.

A Practical Approach

When designing an activity with AI integration, we suggest working through these questions:

What do you want students to learn? Identify which Knowledge Dimension (Factual, Conceptual, Procedural, or Metacognitive) the activity primarily targets.
What cognitive work should they do? Identify which Cognitive Process level (Remember, Understand, Apply, Analyze, Evaluate, or Create) the activity primarily targets.
Where does AI genuinely help? Consider where AI could reduce busywork, scaffold weaker skills, or provide feedback — without taking over the learning itself.
What must stay human? Name the specific thinking, decision-making, or reflection that students must do without AI assistance. In our Activity Designer, this is called Protected Student Work.
How will you know students did it? Design assessment that captures the human cognitive work, not just the final artifact.

A Note on Universal Design for Learning

Throughout our work, we draw on Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles: offering multiple means of engagement, representation, and action/expression. UDL and AI integration work well together; both assume students come in with different strengths, contexts, and needs, and both push us toward pedagogical flexibility rather than one-size-fits-all instruction. When using our Activity Designer, UDL principles are baked into every generated prompt, shaping the AI's recommendations throughout.

4. Our AI Statement

We used generative AI as a collaborator throughout the process of building Bloom's stAIrcase. Specifically, AI assisted with writing and debugging code, drafting prose we then edited, suggesting design alternatives, organizing complex information into the structures you see, and catching errors we wouldn't have noticed on our own.

What Stayed Human

The pedagogical decisions remained human. We decided which frameworks to adopt, how to adapt them, which competencies to emphasize, how to define "protected student work," what a responsible AI-integrated activity looks like. We vetted every source cited here, read Kennedy's framework and Heer's adaptation of Anderson and Krathwohl in their original contexts, and made editorial choices about what to include, exclude, and emphasize. When AI caught a framing we hadn't considered, we took it seriously but checked its reasoning against our own expertise and the published literature.

Our Stance

We are neither AI boosters nor AI refusers. Generative AI is already part of higher education and the question isn't whether to engage with it but how to engage with it thoughtfully, ethically, and with our students' learning at the center. This site is one small contribution toward making the thinking around AI integration more collective.

A Note on Your Data

We don't track visitors, set advertising cookies, or collect personal information about how you use this site. The only data we store on your device is a small browser preference flag — so we don't show you the welcome message every time you visit. We never see this flag; it lives only in your browser.

The only personal information we ever collect is what you choose to share with us when you submit an activity (such as your name, email, and institution). We use that information solely to follow up about your submission and never share or sell it.

5. Credits & Sources

This site stands on the shoulders of others. We gratefully acknowledge the following scholars and works whose thinking directly shaped Bloom's stAIrcase:

Dr. Kara Kennedy — AI Literacy Framework (2023) Our AI Literacy Framework is a revision of Dr. Kennedy's original 2023 framework, used here under a Creative Commons CC-BY license. We've expanded "Safety" into "Safety & Ethics" (adding environmental impact) and reframed "Problem Solving" as "Critical Thinking & Agency" to emphasize learner autonomy in the human-AI relationship. View the original framework.
Rex Heer — A Model of Learning Objectives (Iowa State CELT) Our Bloom's Taxonomy interactive diagram adapts Rex Heer's visual model, published by the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at Iowa State University. View Heer's original model.
Lorin W. Anderson & David R. Krathwohl — A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing (2001) The revised Bloom's Taxonomy that grounds this entire site. Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds.). (2001). A Taxonomy for Learning, Teaching, and Assessing: A Revision of Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. Longman.
David Wiley — Generative Textbooks The inspiration for our Activity Designer's prompt-generation approach. Visit Generative Textbooks.
CAST — Universal Design for Learning Guidelines UDL principles inform every activity recommendation produced by our tool. View the UDL Guidelines.

License

Bloom's stAIrcase is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0). You are free to share and adapt our work for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you give appropriate credit and distribute your contributions under the same license.

Questions or Feedback?

Reach out to Nicole Baker or Brigette Meskell on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear how you're using the site in your own teaching.