This paper investigates the origins of the instrumental genesis and instrumental orchestrations frameworks. This is done by reviewing instrumented activity situations, instrumental genesis, and instrumental orchestrations with the purpose of identifying their epistemological assumptions, what they foreground in their suggested analysis approaches and the nature of the outcomes of their analyses. The paper then discusses the potential implications of using instrumental genesis and instrumental orchestrations to examine teachers’ use of modern technology. The paper finds that instrumental genesis and instrumental orchestrations have potential shortcomings since the technologies that currently exist in school contexts are rather different from the technologies instrumental genesis was originally developed to study.