Among the many things my colleague Jane Hart does for our community is to compile the Top 100 Tools for learning each year. I think it’s a very interesting exercise, showing how we ourselves learn, and the fact that it’s been going on for a number of years provides interesting insight. Here are my tools, in no particular order:
WordPress is how I host and write this Learnlets blog, thinking out loud.
Keynote is how I develop and communicate my thinking to audiences (whether I eventually have to port to PPT for webinars or not).
Twitter is how I track what people find interesting.
Facebook is a way to keep in touch with a tighter group of people on broader topics than just learning. I’m not always happy with it, but it works.
Skype is a regular way to communicate with people, using a chat as a backchannel for calls, or keeping open for quick catch ups with colleagues. An open chat window with my ITA colleagues is part of our learning together.
OmniGraffle is the tool I use to diagram, one of the ways I understand and communicate things.
OmniOutliner often is the way I start thinking about presentations and papers.
Google is my search tool.
Word is still the way I write when I need to go industrial-strength, getting the nod over Pages because of it’s outlining and keyboard shortcuts.
GoodReader on the qPad is the way I read and markup documents that I’m asked to review.
That’s 10, so I guess I can’t mention how I’ve been using Graphic Converter to edit images, or GoToMeeting as the most frequent (tho’ by no means the only) web conferencing environment I’ve been asked to use.
I exhort you to also pass on your list to Jane, and look forward to the results.
It’s helpful to see a current list of helpful tools .. As technology changes so rapidly, it becomes difficult to know everything that is available. Also, knowing the reason why someone finds the tools useful makes it easy for me to picture how I will use them. Thanks for sharing this list!