We’re always trying to figure out the best tools for teachers, trends in the education technology industry, and generally doing our darnedest to bring you new and exciting ways to enhance the classroom. But I wanted to take a moment to bring a wonderful list of resources to your attention.
Jane Hart of the United Kingdom’s Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies has been assembling a list of the best resources for the past five years. But these resources aren’t just randomly organized by popularity or something, the order is decided by a crowdsourced vote. What could be better than that?
I personally find the order of the tools to be pretty spot on. What do you think?
5 Most Popular Tools
- YouTube
- Google Docs / Drive
- Skype
- WordPress
5 Most Surprising Tools
- Yammer
- Voki
- Microsoft Word
- Geogebra
- Storybird
5 Little Known Tools
- Knol
- Mahara
- Lino
- Udutu
- Etherpad
Thanks for sharing a really amazing list! It may need to be updated to eliminate items like Knols which have been discontinued.
A new list is compiled every year – in fact voting has already started for the 2012 list. Please contribute your Top 10 Tools for Learning to help me build the Top 100 2012 http://c4lpt.co.uk/top-100-tools-for-learning-2011/voting-2012/
Jane Hart, Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies
Recently launched powerpoetry.org is good for poetry ideas and inspiration for teens. (yeah we’re biased)
Just as a reference, wikipedia is not a reliable resource. We are banned from using it in college. You should keep that in mind when using it in the classroom. Any person on the planet can go into a page and change the information. This makes it unreliable.
The fact that “Any person on the planet can go into a page and change the information” is much more a strength than a weakness. Experience (& the journal “Nature”) show that Wikipedia is as accurate as other conventional encyclopedias and is updated far more frequently.
I also discourage student’s from citing Wikipedia and tell them to go to the source material cited in Wikipedia. For a quick scan of a subject Wikipedia is unbeatable.
(As a teacher I also like to re-use the various media found in Wikipedia as it is (nearly) all licensed for re-use.)
FYI I just looked up Knol– it has been phased out in favor of Annotum. . .
If you are a Maths teacher visnos .com is an amazing resource.
Storybird is a great tool to inspire children to read, and create their own stories. Very easy to use.
merci, trés bien
Thanks for sharing a amazing list. I have never visited to last 5 of your list ( little known tools ).
Hi Jane, some great tools here, thanks for adding them in.
I did notice that on slide 51 for Screenr that it links to wallwisher, thought you might like to know this
Thanks again
Matt