Jane Hart is the Founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies and as you can see from her blog, 2016 marks the 10^th year of her annual Top 100 Tools for Learning list.

Jane has put together all the presentation slidesets as well as an alphabetical list of ALL the tools which have appeared on any of the lists.

The 2015 slideset is shown here.

Voting is now open for the Top 200 Tools for Learning 2016 and will close on Friday 30 September 2016, and the 10th annual list will be released on Monday 3 October 2016. You can find all the voting guidance and forms here. Note the 200, not 100; as you can see from Jane’s description she is making some changes to celebrate the anniversary.

From the voting guidance you can see that there are three methods of voting, my choice is:
3 Write a blog post about your choice and send the link to Jane Hart.

So these are my own 2016 choices as top tools for learning because these are tools I use all the time in my job, both in my teaching and in my role as a senior leader. Note that we are not discussing subject specialist resource sites here (that’s another whole (updated) story), but tools for education generally; I think it is very useful to remind ourselves of Jane Hart’s own definition:

“Any software or online tool or service that can be used for your own personal learning or for teaching or training”.

Looking at Jane’s alphabetical list of ALL the tools which have appeared on any of the lists, I thought it would be interesting to see which tools have been on all nine lists to date and also at popular tools from the last 5 lists, 2011-2015. I used a favourite tool, Excel to create these, the file is available if of interest: Jane Hart Top 100 Tools – Colleen Young analysis Note the tabs at the bottom, the first three worksheets show the tools which have been in every list, 2007-2015, the last two look at the longer list of tools which have been in the list for the last 5 years. You can read Jane’s fascinating analysis of trends for work place learning.

Tools on the list every year since 2007

Average Rank 2011-2015

To elaborate further on my choices
Evernote  – an outstanding note-taking tool and something I use every day. I have a notebook for each of my classes to which I upload any resources I want for that class; I also jot down any ideas I have for each class. I can use it on any PC, tablet or my phone. It is also a good way to share for example a list of websites with students – using a shared notebook. I have many notebooks both for my job and life generally; the search facility in Evernote is awesome and the ability to link from one note to another, very powerful. (Blog post on Evernote).

WordPress  – obviously – you are reading a WordPress blog right now! I have several other blogs, Games, Starters and for students I have created Mathematics for Students and something I am very pleased with is a blog I use to give the details of homework for each of my classes. I created ‘What was that homework?’ as a result of a survey of students across several schools where many students said that they would like homework details online. No student can ever say to me that they didn’t know what their homework was! I also have blogs on useful tools for students and teachers generally. (The very first post on this WordPress blog – which includes some useful WordPress links).

Google which is a vote for Google search. See Google help on search or this Google Guide

Twitter  – great for professional development – I have contacts in education all over the globe and have been led to many useful resources by my virtual colleagues! See Mathematics Conversations. and this post on Twitter.

Slideshare  – it is very easy to upload presentations to this (free) presentation sharing site; the two shows above are examples. Presentations for teachers or students could be uploaded for example.

PowerPoint I can’t really have Slideshare without including PowerPoint in my list because that’s where I start with my presentations, often with a little help from the interactive whiteboard software. It is interesting to see how popular PowerPoint was last year at number 5, other presentation software such as Prezi is also useful, but it’s so important to remember that it’s the content that matters! See this post, Presentations for some reading and resources on presentations.

Excel is something I use everyday in my job to analyse and present data; I also use many spreadsheets for teaching. Of all the applications in the Office suite this stands out for me, the changes from Excel 2003 to 2007 with the massive improvements to conditional formatting for example make this one outstanding application. There are also many Excel spreadsheets out there too to help in Maths lessons – see Maths Files for example.