Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies continues to do our entire industry a great service. If you haven't visited her website recently, check it out and be amazed at the information she has pulled together on the top tools used for learning and personal productivity.
For the past several years, Jane has asked e-learning professionals what learning and personal productivity tools—broadly construed—would make their personal Top 10. She has then aggregated the results, and provided them back to us in various formats. The results are fascinating and enlightening, and are a great way to learn about new tools (or at least tools that are new to you!).
I participated in both 2007 and 2008, and I am now one of the early participants to update my Top 10 list for 2009. This year Jane has two separate lists: “Top 100 Tools For Learners” and “Top 100 Tools For Learning Professionals”. I’ll be checking her site here throughout the year to monitor the growth of these lists.
To see the Top-100 list for 2008, which was finalized in October, you can view it as either a ranking table or a SlideShare presentation. To give you a sense for the types of tools that people are including, Jane has organized this same Top-100 list by category as a "Toolset for Learning 2009". The categories are:
- Web Browsers and Extensions
- Social Bookmarking
- RSS Tools
- Email Tools
- Productivity Tools
- Personal Start Page
- Document Tools
- Presentation Tools
- Imaging Tools
- Audio/Podcasting Tools
- Video Tools
- Screen Capture and Screencasting Tools
- Blogging, Wiki, and Web Authoring Tools
- Course Authoring and Course Management Tools
- Interactivity Tools
- Live Communication Tools
- Social Networking Tools
To see what individual contributors (all 223 of us!) had to say for our Top-10 lists in 2008, see the "Top 10 Tools for 2008 Alphabetical List."
If you'd like to see the top FREE tools, Jane has pulled those ones out in a Top-25 list.
Or if you just want more tools, free and otherwise, see her massive directory of tools. Is 2,700 tools, all nicely sorted by category, enough for you?
Lastly, I've summarized some of the information Jane provides on learning and personal productivity tools, but her site provides much more, including a Twitter directory of learning professionals, a series of articles that introduce you to the world of social learning, a library of reading lists on a wide range of topics, and much more.
If you find these resources as valuable as I do, be sure to send Jane a note to thank her for her hard work in creating and maintaining this resource. It's great stuff!
— Thomas Stone (Tom_Stone@elementk.com)
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