TOP 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 7 July 2008

1. Firefox is my preferred browser. And since I use many web based tools, this is the tool I use the most on my computer, either at work or at home.

2. iGoogle is what I use for my personal home page. It allows me to display the information I want and keep up to date with RSS feeds, news, stocks, and so on.

3. Google Reader is my feed aggregator. With it I can track my favourite blogs through a widget on my iGoogle page.

4. Google Alert is very useful to track the web for news on matters of interest to me. It can also be displayed in a widget on my iGoogle page.

5. Open Office is as powerful as MS Office but way cheaper: it's free. The best thing about it is that I can create PDFs straight from the File menu, no plugin or other application required.

6. Thunderbird is my email client. I've added the Calendar plugin so I can see my Google Calendar as part of thunderbird. The plugin also adds a task list. With those tools, Thunderbird is, in my mind, the perfect replacement for Outlook.

7. FreeMind is a free mind mapping application. I use it to structure my ideas and link to references before I start to develop content.

8. Joomla! is the content management system I use for my web sites. It is free and provides plenty of components to suits my specific needs.

9. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, is now one my primary sources of learning. Anytime I hit a word or a concept I'm not familiar with, I search it on wikipedia.

10. Google Calendar is the tool I used for my personal calendar. I can access my calendar wherever I am and many applications, such as the Mozilla Calendar extension, even allow to integrate your Google Calendar into other tools.

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.

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.