217 educational technologists and learning professionals from around the world are currently collaboratively to create a list of the Top 100 Tools for Learning in 2008.
This list has been compiled for the past few years by the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies, and is a good jumping off point if you have been thinking of trying out some new tools in your teaching practice, or are looking for new tools to boost your own productivity.
Social bookmarking tool Delicious, web browser FireFox and RSS reader Google Reader currently sit 1, 2 and 3 on the list.
Tools that seem to be gaining traction among educator and educational technologists are the microblogging site Twitter, (although at least one high profile EdTech user has recently abandoned the service). Twitter is up from 43rd to 11th place since last year. Social networking site Ning (31 to 16) and collaborative slideshow tool VoiceThread (101 to 23) are also on the rise.
The Centre is accepting entries and votes for the list until October 31.
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4 Responses
Jan Smith
November 2nd, 2008 at 1:28 pm
1Hi Clint,
I am looking forward to the finalized results of that list. My own caveat with lists of that type is to consciously put my filters on before viewing them. If I add a tool, I have to take one away, because I just can’t attend to them all. I have to give myself permission to move between the tools and not try to juggle them all.
RSS used to be the focus tool for me, then my own blog, with lots of reading and commenting. Now that my students are blogging, I spend a lot of time supporting that, so my time for professional blogging is down. Twitter is a key tool for learning for me…I can keep it open and learn from my pln while I am doing other things. It combines a sort of RSS with the faces and personalities of the folks I like to learn from.
Maybe when the list comes out I will drop Twitter for another…but I can’t quite picture that right now!
What tools would be in your top three? Which tools do you encourage your students to experiment with?
Clint
November 5th, 2008 at 11:48 am
2Hi Jan,
I hear you about the blinders. It’s easy to start straying down a path that sometimes doesn’t seem like it has value in the hopes that someday it may pay off.
Personally, the tools I use on a daily basis to keep up are Firefox, tricked out with a dozen or so useful extensions. Useful FireFox extenions could be a list unto itself. Hmmm.
Netvibes is my personal aggregation page. Like you, RSS is the glue that holds much of my online life together, and Netvibes is my aggregator. Can’t live online with it.
Third tool is Delicious to not only keep track of my bookmarks, but also to see what my peers are finding interesting on the web.
In the class, delicious is also one of my primary tools that I encourage students to use. I also make an effort to show them RSS and how RSS feeds can be used to simplify staying up to date in their field. Wiki’s are the final tool in the classroom trifecta for me.
Funny, email didn’t crack the top 100. I wonder if that is because it is so ubiquitous or because it is so loathed by users?
DebbieG
November 8th, 2008 at 3:35 pm
3I’m surprised that Twitter is as high as it is, and that YouTube is as low as it is. I put YouTube number two on mine, I think, with delicious #1, as it is on the master list. I should take some time to think of how NetVibes can work for me – I use Bloglines as an aggregator, but would like more “one-stop” shopping.
Clint
November 8th, 2008 at 4:55 pm
4LinkedIn was the surprise for me. I always saw that as much more of a professional networking tool as opposed to an EdTech tool. But if the goal of your learning is to be networked to the right people, it makes sense that it is that high on the list.
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Preceden is a free web application that lets you make timelines.
Planning on giving your students a video assignment? Here is a great primer on how to set up a video project for students. With assignment examples and rubrics. From Duke University.
PLP is a professional development model that immerses educators into environments and practices that allow them to learn and own the literacies of 21st Century learning and teaching.
Instance of Etherpad, hosted by Chris Prillo. More at http://chris.pirillo.com/better-than-google-docs-etherpad-alternatives/
Promising looking project ind evelopment. EduFeedr is an educationally enhanced feed reader for blog-based courses.
Also see: http://www.scribd.com/doc/22965114/EduFeedr-%E2%80%94-Redesigning-the-Feed-Reader-for-an-Open-Education
and https://wiki.mozilla.org/EduFeedr_Blueprint
The research was funded by mobile company Qualcomm, but still interesting to se the results that "classes using the smartphones have consistently achieved significantly higher proficiency rates on their end of course exams."
Nice list of video resources, including some online video editing services
I've found this as well
“Waves need to have a specific focus, otherwise it’s just a chat, and there are better mediums for that.”
“Waves that don’t have a specific focus need roles to help manage the threads.”
“Waves need maintenance. Stuff can be consolidated/deleted/cleaned. It’s a collaboration tool – people have to work/negotiate with each other.”
“By virtue of sharing something in a wave with others, the default expectation is that someone WILL edit what you say. It is not an authoring platform to exchange ideas. It’s a platform to converge ideas.”
“Facilitated/hosted waves need organization, maybe even design or Wave “templates.” Much like #lrnchat (Editor’s Note: running discussions on Twitter about learning) is organized with a warmup question and three ensuing questions, maybe a good wave needs to use blips or wavelets as conventions for certain types of group discussion or group work.”
Many students, teachers, instructional technologists, and administrators consider the LMS too inflexible and are turning to the web for tools that support their everyday communication, productivity, and collaboration needs. Blogs, wikis, social networking sites, microblogging tools, and other web-based applications are supplanting the teaching and learning tools previously found only inside the LMS.