TOP 10 TOOLS 2007, 2008 & 2009
Seb Schmoller

Seb divides his time between independent consulting, and part-time employment as the Chief Executive of ALT - the Association for Learning Technology. ALT is a UK professional and scholarly association which promotes good practice in the use of learning technologies in education and industry, and facilitates collaboration between learning technology practitioners, researchers, and policy makers. 

Seb also writes a Fortnightly Mailing. which has a focus on online learning and the internet.  It summarises and comments on resources and news that he finds in the course of his work.

Seb's Top 10 Tools as at 11 October 2009

1. Firefox and Thunderbird- - Open Source browser and e-mail client from Mozilla - both with a growing range of add-ons, ranging from a spell checker available in many languages that shows up errors when using form-based systems like blogs, to much more technical tools such as Firebug to help you understand the underlying structure of a web page.

3. iGoogle - - into which I can put much of the content I use day to day:
   RSS feeds; key bookmarks; interfaces with Twitter and Friendfeed. (I'm ignoring my privacy concerns.)

4. TypePad - - The blogging service I use for Fortnightly Mailing - Economical. Very fast support-desk, run by humans.

5. Friendfeed - - a good way to summarise resources short of going to the trouble of writing a blog post about them. Very functional interface, and the scope for other users to comment is powerful.

6. Microsoft Office. Whilst I'm not much of a PowerPointer, I use Word and Excel extensively. I particularly like Word's Outliner; and there are many situations in which some of Excel's easy-to-learn "advanced"
   features - like filters, conditional formatting and the like, save a lot of time and effort.

7. Yac Voice Conferencing - - there are free alternatives, but for routinely organising telephone conferences, the simplicity and high audio quality of conferences set up with Yac take some beating.

8. Google Docs - - and in particular the forms feature in Google Spreasheet, which makes it easy quickly to set up functional data capture for events, feedback, etc.

9. CrowdVine - - a well engineered and above all fast social networking system for groups and for conferences, which has generally been well received by ALT-C delegates.

10. Google Wave - - this is premature, but from my trial account I can tell that it will be viable and completely different way of providing a "resource-spine" for learners on courses.
     

Seb's Top 10 Tools as at 29 January 2008

No change, really, except that I am now using a social bookmarking tool called Magnolia. Hard justify it superseding any of the 10 that are already there....; other than for effect!

Seb's Top 10 Tools as at 26 July 2007

1. Firefox and Thunderbird - - Open Source browser and e-mail client from Mozilla - both with a growing range of add-ons, ranging from a spell checker available in many languages that shows up errors when using form-based systems like blogs, to much more technical tools such as Firebug to help you understand the underlying structure of a web page.

2. TypePad - - The blogging service I use for Fortnightly Mailing - . Economical. Very fast support-desk, run by humans. Easily learnt,  but see The new polaroid is Typepad for an adverse comment on what happens if you want to move stuff out of Typepad

3. iGoogle - - into which I can put much of the content I use day to day: RSS feeds; Google Mail, key bookmarks; a Google Calendar. I do not exploit it as much as I could, and I've yet to work out if my privacy concerns are real or notional.

4. Microsoft Office. Whilst I'm not much of a PowerPointer, I use Word and Excel extensively. I particularly like Word's Outliner; and there are many situations in which some of Excel's easy-to-learn "advanced" features - like filters, conditional formatting and the like, save a lot of time and effort.

5. Validator - - The World Wide Web Consortium's free validation tool enables you quickly to test whether a web page, blog-post etc, is valid HTML or XHTML.

6. Jotspot - - JotSpot is a powerful "application wiki", that I've been using for some years both in ALT and elsewhere. Here is an example of a manual created with JotSpot.  Currently you cannot create a new JotSpot account because the company, having been acquired by Google is being integrated into Google Apps.

7. Trident List - - is run by an Australian company and provides a secure, economical, and well engineered and supported email list service.

8. Cute FTP - - is the cheap and functional FTP programme that I use to maintain web sites.

9. Olympus WS100 voice recorder  - - cheap, and unobtrusive, and specifically designed for reporters wanting to make high quality voice recordings. Has a USB interface

10. Yac Voice Conferencing - -  there are free alternatives, but for routinely organising telephone conferences, the simplicity and high audio quality of conferences set up with Yac take some beating.