TOP TOOLS
TOP 10 TOOLS 2007 & 2008
Guy Boulet

Guy is a Learning Advisor at Laval University, in Quebec City, Canada.  He is an elearning advocate and strong supporter of informal learning. Guy's website and blog (in French) are at www.guyboulet.net.

Guy's Top 10 Tools as at 2 January 2008

1. Ubuntu - The Linux distribution I started to use three months ago for trial purpose and kept using since. It gave me the opportunity to learn more about Linux and to discover many related applications. And the best thing is that I do not depend on Microsoft anymore, except at the office since I do not have a choice.

2. Firefox - The open source web browser. This is the most used tool on my computer since most of my computer time is spent on the net.

3. Google Reader - Very useful to track all those blogs where I can learn more about learning and share other people thoughts and ideas.

4. Thunderbird - Mozilla's open source email application helps me share ideas with friends and colleagues.

5. Google Search - Where I perform 99,9% of my internet searches for answers to my questions.

6. Open Office - The open source office suite which helps me redacting reports and papers as well as creating presentations, graphs and so on.

7. Wikipedia - The collective encyclopedia where I look whenever I need to know more about something.

8. Joomla! - The open source content management system that powers my web site, my personal blog and helps me keep track of content of interest.

9. FreeMind - A mental map application, once again open source, that I use to structure my ideas and arrange them in a coherent manner.

10. iGoogle - My personal google homepage where I have immediate access to my RSS feeds, news headlines, weather forecasts, etc. A one stop shop to access all kind of information.

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Guy's Top 10 Tools as at 28 July 2007

1. OpenOffice - Mainly because it is not a Microsoft product and the fact that it is absolutely free. Not only can it open and save MS Office file formats, it also allows to save to PDF. It even includes a nicely featured drawing application.

2. Firefox - This is my most used piece of software (after the operating system). I like its flexibility and its growing popularity forces many plugins to now support FireFox.

3. Thunderbird - I have 8 different email accounts and Thunderbird makes it easy to manage them all.

4. Sunbird - As a plugin to ThunderBird it allows me to manage my agenda quite easily. Still in beta but in my opinion a lot of potential to become a serious rival to Outlook calendar.

5. Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio - Quick and easy way to create e-learning presentations and assessments. The only downside: it requires PowerPoint. Would be very nice to have a version that supports OpenOffice Impress. One of the few proprietary software I use.

6. Captivate - The best software simulation creation tool so far. Easy to use and quite powerful. Another of the few proprietary software I like.

7. Audacity - A robust sound recording/editing tool and it is open source.

8. Google Sidebar -  I love it. It provides a large number of gadgets, not always useful but still. I use the Web Clips gadget to track my favorite RSS feeds almost in real time.

9. Atutor - Open source LMS. Quite user friendly and provides all the tools I need from a LMS

10. Joomla - I use it for all my web sites. Provides a large number of components and plugins and the admin portal is really user friendly.