Quote-A-Day: Day 245

Any #tool is only as good as how it is used. #QuoteADay #Day245 #edchat #edu #edtech #NYedchat #ASCDL2L

We're drafting tonight in our fantasy football league.  I was taking a look through the league management tools for the draft (I'm the LM in a league this year), and there are so many different iterations for league design, that if you aren't careful, you could do something disastrous (or more likely, ridiculous; 1,000 pts for a rushing touchdown, anyone?).

Any tool, whether football drafting software, classroom management application, or webcam hardware, are all tools that can have tremendous impacts on our lives, our learning, and our leadership.

That being said, a tool is only as good as how it is used, and even the best tools can become detriments to leading and learning if they aren't used well.

Let's take Twitter, for instance.

I'm a huge user of Twitter, and as far as social media tools go, it is the medium that has the most worth for me as an educator, and the one that I also use most frequently.  But, Twitter can be used badly, even with all its advantages.  A misdirected tweet, putting something in writing that should be said face-to-face; these small mistakes can have drastic implications.  However, if we use a tool like Twitter well, and utilize it to share knowledge as well as gain it, we can change lives, literally.

It falls on us to make sure we're embracing tools for all the right reasons, and that in our embrace, we aren't forgetting that tools can do different things in the hands of different people, and as such, we need to make sure that we're educating others (and ourselves) on how best to use these wonderful tools.