Finding and evaluating educational technology tools

These days, it seems as though there is a new web 2.0 tool out every day, and on top of that, all of them seem to have some kind of educational application. If you are interested in using technology for teaching and learning, then it is important to develop ways of finding and evaluating useful technological tools. Luckily, teachers are developing very rich networks to help each other stay informed, for example through email lists, blogs, wikis and Twitter. In this blog post I would like to share the sources that I use in an effort to keep up to date. I'd encourage you to check out these sources yourselves, and let me know about good sources that you use yourself. Note that this isn't intended to be some kind of exhaustive list, it just reflects my own practice which I hope you might find useful as a starting point.

Email lists and newsletters
I am on a few email lists relating to educational technology, or language learning and technology (but I have cut back a bit). You might find these helpful:

• IATEFL learning technologies SIG
• CALICO discussion list
• Edutopia newsletter (as I've said before, I find this very useful)

Blogs
When I get time, I read these blogs:

• Tom Barrett's edte.ch (school context, his Interesting Ways lists are especially good)
• Will Richardson's Weblogg-ed (school context)
• David Parry's academhack (university context)

Others that I would recommend, especially for ideas about technology in language teaching:

• Nik Peachey's blogs: (Learning technology and Quick Shout)
• Larry Ferlazzo's websites of the day
• Graham Stanley's blog-efl (especially if you are interested in Second Life)

If you have a look at the blogroll on these blogs, you can also find a lot of interesting, related material.

Wikis
Wikis are great at bringing people together to pool resources. Here are a few that I have stumbled across at various points:

• Cool tools for schools
• Indispensable tools
• Digital and online video

Twitter
This is actually the best source for me, because it's a place where educators share up-to-the-minute information. I follow a lot of the bloggers that I read, and find their updates very helpful. Check out:

• @tombarrett
• @willrich
• #edtech
• #edchat
  

As well as the posts to Twitter, I have been very impressed with paper.li, where (among other things) you can get a daily digest of useful #edtech posts or #edchat posts.

Of course, staying up-to-date is only part of the problem. The real challenge comes in figuring out how the tools and strategies that you read about can be applied to your own teaching. Often that involves a rather time-consuming process of exploration and reflection, particularly when it comes to answering the question: 'How can these technological tools promote the kind of language learning that I expect my students to be engaged in?'