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.

Tagging Variations

Today I was supposed to get stuck right back into planning for Term 1, but alas, I was found to be procrastinating. Not entirely a waste of time though as it saw me doing something I’ve been planning to do for ages – tidying up the tags I use for bookmarking sites in Diigo. The reason I wanted to do this was because I had several tags for the one thing, for example: socialnetworking and social_networking and ‘social networking.’ I know, I could tag each site that I wanted to use this tag on three different ways, but I really am in favour of keeping things as simple as possible and so wanted to use just one version. Which one though? Does it matter?I actually like the social_networking version best because it separates the words making them easier to read but keeps the whole phrase clearly together. But, I didn’t choose to go with that version because after looking around a bit at what other people were doing, most people use the version without spaces – socialnetworking.

On the edit tags page on Diigo it tells me how many times I’ve used a particular tag as well as telling me how many times that tag has been used throughout Diigo. For example, you can see here that I have used the tag google_earth 6 times, but it has been used throughout the Diigo community 1251 times to tag different websites.

If I change that tag to googleearth as one word then let’s see what happens:

Ah! Now I see this variation has been used 4378 times throughout the community.

So, what’s the moral of the story? For me, it’s a few points:

There are a few different tagging variations used
Most people tag by not putting spaces between the words
It doesn’t matter which variation I use, so I’ll stick with one to keep things simple for myself
When searching by using tags it’s important to make sure I try a few variations of the tag to maximse search results.

Here are a few questions I’ve had about tagging for a while:

When we tag things should we think that we tagging for ourselves to find it later, or for others? Of course we are doing both in reality and tagging things so others can find them is the social part of ’social bookmarking’!
How should this effect the tags we use, as in the number of tags per bookmark, or the detail? Does it matter? Advice I’ve read in the past says to use as many tags as possible per bookmark/item. I guess that makes sense as giving something a tag in effect puts it into a ‘folder’ of other items with that tag. People will look in different ‘folders’ for the same thing, so as many tags as a practicable makes sense.
Should we use variations of the same tag on each bookmark?
Does anyone have a system they use when tagging? For example, do you use words from the title, then words from the first paragraph, and then look at the overall article?

Tagging is something I have found confusing in the past and a while to get used to so if you’ve got some great advice, I’d love to hear it!

7 Things You Don’t Need…

…to know about me, but might be interesting anyway!

Having been tagged by Graham Wegner and reading a few of these posts over the past couple of weeks, I decided that whilst sitting here in the shade in a nice breeze I might just join in the game.

1. Nick and I are living at my Mum’s at the moment. We are building a house about 20 minutes north of here in a suburb called Doreen (of all the ridiculous names for a suburb!). We are hoping the house is ready by the end of March, but not too sure.

2. In our wedding vows Nick promised to laugh with me and AT me, and I promised to be patient when he wants to buy expensive toys.

3. I cannot eat hot and spicy food no matter how hard I try or how good it smells. It’s just not in me.

4. I have wanted a Cocker Spaniel puppy since I was 7 and this year will be the year I get one! Hopefully Fred, the Jack Russell I have, will appreciate the company.

5. I used to play classical flute. Really loved it at school, and was going to try out for the Conservatorium at Melb Uni but changed my mind. Haven’t played for two years now.

6. I once worked at a Bingo hall calling back the numbers when someone said ‘Bingo!’ People were allowed to smoke inside. It was feral.

7. I love watching crappy romantic comedies and sometimes reading chick lit books because it requires absolutely no brain power whatsoever and that can be a relief sometimes.

Ah, now the time has come to tag others with this meme….<she delves into her Google Reader for ideas>…and so I tag (and apologies if they have been tagged before!):

Me – Everyday! The Twitter 365 Project

Thanks to an invite from Lauren O’Grady, I have just joined the Twitter 365 Project. The challenge is to take a photo of yourself each day of this year and post it to the group. It will be interesting to see they changes in ourselves and changes in locations if there are any. I will try also to write maybe one or two lines of what I was thinking about when I took the photo or something like that. Nothing too involved or I’ll never get around to it!

Click here to find the project and consider sharing a pic of yourself everyday for the next 365!

This would be a great project for a class. They could make their own group on Flickr and take a photo of themselves and a thought about one thing they learned about a particular subject that day. It could be a great digital portfolio of sorts. Students could be encouraged to take a photo with an expression on their face that communicated how they were feeling that day or holding up a word written on a piece of paper that was important to their learning that day. Many possibilities. Got any other ideas?