Key Questions About New Tools

What key things do you consider when looking at using a new tool in lessons? There are so many new tools out there to explore and have fun with. So many new things to learn that it is easy to feel overwhelmed. Or, if you are anything like me, you might feel a little too excited and rush in to try to use lots of different things and then realise that while many of them worked really well, you could have probably thought about it a bit more to make sure something of slightly more substance was produced, or realised that it wasn’t the best tool on offer! Ah well, that might just be the natural order of learning all of these things. When first introduced to Web 2.0 goodness it is easy to get involved in everything , join everything, try to try everything, think everything is magic. Then when you are exhausted from all that (I write with myself in mind!) you are still as enthusiastic, but with the understanding that you have to have the right tool for the job. So, this year I want to come up with a few key questions that I will apply to each new tool that I want to use, and even to ones that I am already using. The beginning of some sort of framework for critically evaluating Web 2.0 tools if you will. Here are the questions that jump out to me:

• Why am I interested?
• What benefit do I think using it will have for my students?
• How will it help/allow them to create and show what they know?
• What sort of time will it take for me to learn? For my students to learn? Is is worth the time?
• Is there something else that does it better?

Last year sometime I was at an eLearning conference in Geelong and in his keynote speech, Andrew Douch covered this same topic. Two questions that he asks really stood out to me:

• Will this let me do something I haven’t been able to do before? Or will it let me do the things I have already been doing better?
• Will it get better results?

He also mentioned that he asks whether or not something is a pencil or a space pen - The Americans spent lots of money developing a biro that worked in space. The Russians used a pencil. What do you see as the most critical points to question when deciding to use a new tool? Do you have a framework you use to make an evaluation of new tools? I’d like to be able to whittle the list down to 4 or 5 key questions that I can remember easily and that cover the most important points - which would probably be about letting students create, the time factor and whether or not it really is allowing something to happen that would not have happened before. What do you think?

Image is: ‘Nailed It’ by Cayusa.