Recently I attended one of my favorite education conferences of the year, the ICE Conference (Illinois Computing Educators) in St. Charles, Illinois. This conference boasts an attendance of around four thousand educators, many of which travel a pretty good distance to attend.

Sessions are aplenty at this conference. And, like any good educational technology conference, the “tips and tricks” and “30 tools” type sessions always seem to have standing room only.

So, while I found myself sitting in one of these sessions, I turned to Twitter. Not to tweet every tool that was being shared (although I did tweet some, because they were awesome), but to remind attendees that we must be critical of our tech use in the classroom. One of my favorite tweets that speaks to this is here:

Nothing concerns me more than instruction that lacks purpose as it has the ability to not only waste time, but more importantly waste energy and interest.

I kept tweeting during that session about the importance of setting up a central goal – a purpose for your instruction – BEFORE selecting a tech tool to use for your lesson. Let your instructional goals drive your technology selection process, certainly not the other way around.

It is easy to fall into the “I want to try all this cool stuff I learned” trap. My advice? Go slow to go fast. Take a look at your instructional plan for the next month. What kind of activities could be enhanced by the new tools in your arsenal? If there is an easy choice, great – run with that one. However, don’t feel the need to force applicability.

Effective evaluation and use of technology tools can be boiled down to a three-step process, which I’ve dubbed the 3 R’s. Never should you expect that your first attempt to use a new tool will go flawlessly. Use the 3 R’s to learn from those early attempts and make changes to grow after each use.

Reflect

Reflection is an important component of any successful lesson planning process. In this case, when trying (or trying again) tech tools make sure you build time into your schedule to reflect on the success of your lesson and if it accomplished what you wanted. Consider the following questions:

  • Did you accomplish your instructional goal?
  • To what extent did the tech tool help you accomplish your lesson’s goal(s)?
  • What was missing from your lesson? What clarifying questions did students ask?
  • Was the tool easy to use?
  • Is there another (easier, more efficient, more thorough) tool available?

Revise

Revision shows growth. Take all the information you get back from your reflection stage and incorporate that into the revision stage. If your lesson didn’t quite work the way you wanted, what needs to change? Identify those key areas and develop a plan to make it work the next time you try the tech tool (and make sure you do try the tool more than once).

  • What am I doing during the lesson?
  • What are the students doing during the lesson?
  • What is taught/learned?
  • What is produced?
  • What do my students create?

Repeat

This is sometimes the hardest step, but requires the least amount of work. It is very easy to try something once or twice, have it fail, and then vow never to use that tool again. Recognize that to “fail” is your “first attempt in learning.” Rarely are you ever a master of something the first time you try it – teaching and technology are certainly no exception. Find a critical friend in your PLC and do a quick dry-run with your chosen tool. Make sure you feel comfortable – but know that you don’t need to have all the answers. Challenge your students to problem solve when issues arise to which you don’t have an immediate answer.

Here is a tool to help the reflection process when working through the 3 Rs:

View Google Doc – Copy Google Doc

Go slow to go fast. Choose a new tool or two on which you will focus your attention and save the rest for later.

Here's a poster that you can use to share this with teachers: