TOP 10 TOOLS 2008
Helen Whitehead

Helen is an elearning and social media consultant, trainer, writer and researcher. She has worked with schools, colleges and universities, the National College for School Leadership, creative industries, arts & literature, and business and media training. She is an expert in facilitating online communities and develops communities of practice for business and academia. She trains lecturers and tutors (HE, FE, schools and private trainers) in course design with technology and in e-moderating of both learning groups and communities. She shows businesspeople how to make the most of Web 2.0, social media and blogging, as well as developing web content and writing for digital media.  Her websites are www.reachfurther.com and www.periodicfable.com

Helen's Top 10 Tools as at 30 October 2008

1. Can I include my HTC TyTN II? I know it's hardware really, but it's the productivity - Windows mobile if I have to name an app.... much as it pains me to pick Windows! However without it it would be really difficult to do my job – I can make notes and check email in the gaps between meetings and read my blog feed, tweet happily, check the traffic and weather and surf most of the the Web for information wherever I am.

2. Moodle - Moodle has to be my learning environment of choice. None of them are perfect, but Moodle is by far the simplest to use and is designed by people who understand pedagogy not just technology. It is open source and customisable, to the extent it can look like a slick company intranet as easily as a VLE for hundreds of thousands of students.

3. Wordpress - I love blogging. I may even be a addict! Wordpress is my favourite blogging tool. It can be customised, especially with the help of the great community out there offering free themes, and the latest version offers some great features: I am so glad to be able to schedule release of posts, for example so my blog can appear even when I can't. Must get around to moving my personal blog to Wordpress... but I started in Blogger 5 years ago and that's a lot of history! Wordpress is perfectly adequate to base one's whole website in – especially for a small business.

4. Drupal - Drupal is a 'quick' way to create websites with lots of features without needing to know any programming (though it does help, as for the other open source apps if you know some php and css). It's getting more features all the time, and again, a helpful user community is out there. Whe I think how many weeks it took to create a website lie Kids on the Net (www.kidsnthenet.com) years ago with Coldfusion and Access, Drupal could do the same thing in a matter of a few days' work.

5. Wrike - Now here's one of my favourite SaaS apps. Wrike is a to do list and project management tool.  Things I particularly like - you can copy wrike when you send an email and automatically create  a task in the appropriate category - and then it sends you a neat to do list every morning! We're all members in our small firm and can assign one another tasks.

6. Twitter - Another one I'm addicted to! I can keep up to date with what lots of people are doing in my area (elearning, community and social media): the links and comments people post and the discussions they have are invaluable. It can really be a community.

7. Google Reader - Another way to keep oneself in touch with the buzz. I probably subscribe to far too many RSS feeds from blogs and other sources, but scanning through them in Google reader, especially on my pda, is another great way to keep myself up to date.

8. Ning - Currently my social networking tool of choice, though there is more and more competition. Free – but not open source – I use it to run the ELESIG community for those interested in the learners' experience of elearning. As an element of a distributed network it works very well.

9. iGoogle - My iGoogle page is the one I return to minute by minute throughout the day. It has links to my calendar, my most used bookmarks, weather and news and a Twitter app. It really does function like a virtual desk, and is available wherever I am working.

10. Skype - I should include a live communication tool and it's between Elluminate and Skype. I guess Skype has to win because it's free and most of the time it works very well. I have been trying out tools for online meetings with audio and I'm coming back to Skype for its simplicity.