“Where do we start” is a loaded question, but I think we start by considering which tools will deepen our students thinking, meet our educational goals, and provide safe opportunities for them to learn to collaborate.

As far as your second question, I’m not sure. I guess it’s nice to pick the tools the kids are using because they’ll have some experience, but I’m not convinced that should be the first criteria. Perhaps if you identify your learning objective and then look at the tools that would support your goal, you may find that some of the tools they use would work. Planning instruction centered on the tools they use (instead of focused on the learning objective) could be hard to achieve in a meaningful way.

Finally, in response to question 3, I think a lot of tools will be outdated in a few months, but I don’t think we need to switch tools as soon as a “better” one is released. Unless the current tool isn’t working well or meeting your needs, I think you can stick with it for a while. (Otherwise we’d go crazy!)