Jane’s Top 10 Tools for Learning 2019

The Top Tools for Learning 2019 survey will close on Friday 13 September. Have you voted for your favourites yet? If not, you can do so here.

You will need to list your top 10 tools and say how you use them – (a) for personal or professional learning, (b) at work or (c) in a school, college or university setting. You can also share your thoughts on why you like the tools you have nominated too, if you want to.

I will reveal the results of the survey on Wednesday 25 September.

But meanwhile here is my own Top 10 Tools for Learning list for 2019.

  1. TWITTER is the place where I quickly and easily keep up with what’s happening in the world – and in particular what others are up to with their ideas and activities around workplace learning. It’s the first place I go to when I wake up in the morning. But I do prefer to use …
  2. TWEETDECK rather than the web interface – where I’ve set up different columns for my news feed, mentions, hashtags I follow, etc. This makes it much easier for me to see the overall picture of what’s happening in the moment.
  3. I also couldn’t do without FEEDLY – my news reader – where I aggregate well over 300 blog and website feeds. I use this as another means to keep up to date with what’s happening with technology, the future of work, and other related topics.
  4. WORDPRESS is the platform I use to power all my websites. I make use of a large number of plugins that enhance its default functionality and appearance.
  5. I use SLACK to host the online workshops I run – since it as it is all about the social experience; people interacting and learning from one another. Furthermore by using Slack, participants can see how valuable a tool it is and how they can use it in their own organisation to underpin both informal and formal social learning and collaboration. I have integrated it with a number of tools so that content is automatically shared in the channels. This includes my own tweets as well as curated content from
  6. ANDERS PINK – a smart curation platform. For example, I have a briefing set up for “Lifelong Learning” and the content that it finds goes straight into Slack on a daily basis – it’s a no brainer.
  7. I use a number of communication tools: WHATSAPP has become essential for interacting with individuals – clients, colleagues, friends, etc as well as groups. But I also find the Broadcast List functionality particularly useful when I want to keep a large number of people up to date with what’s happening.
  8. I still use personal SKYPE, although not quite so frequently as I once did – however, since lots of my clients use Skype for Business, I make more use of that nowadays.
  9. When it comes to producing stuff (eg resources), I now believe in keeping things as simple as possible; I don’t over-engineer content. I find that I can quickly create effective content using the basic tools like WORD and
  10. POWERPOINT. At the end of the day, the people I create things for are adults – and they don’t want or need trivial or gratuitous “bells and whistles”!

What are your Top 10 Tools for Learning? Please share them in the survey here.