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TOP TOOLS 2007& 2008
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 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
-
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.
-
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
-
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.
- 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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Trident List - - is run by an Australian company
and provides a secure, economical, and well engineered and
supported email list service.
-
Cute FTP - - is the cheap and functional FTP
programme that I use to maintain web sites.
-
Olympus WS100 voice recorder
- - cheap, and unobtrusive, and specifically
designed for reporters wanting to make high quality voice
recordings. Has a USB interface
-
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.
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