Jane Hart is the Founder of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies and 2016 marks the 10th 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 2016 slideset is shown here.
Note from Jane’s overview she has done a finer analysis for 2016 including the Top 100 Tools For Education (for use in primary and secondary (K12) schools, colleges, universities and adult education.)
Back in April, I wroye about my own choices for 2016 and I am always interested to see where my own choices are in Jane’s list.
| CY 2016 votes | Education | Personal Learning & Productivity | Place in Top 200 2016 | Place in Top 100 Tools for Education 2016 |
| Evernote | x | x | 17 | 27 |
| WordPress | x | x | 9 | 13 |
| Google (search) | x | x | 2 | 4 |
| x | x | 3 | 5 | |
| Slideshare | x | 18 | 21 | |
| PowerPoint | x | 4 | 3 | |
| Excel | x | x | 46 | 45 |
| Moodle | x | 27 | 11 | |
| WolframAlpha | x | 198 | – | |
| Desmos | x | – | – |
Those were 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, 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”.
Two more very useful views that Jane has compiled is this Quick View showing the place in the top 200 list, compared to against the Top 100 Tools lists for Personal & Professional Learning (PPL100) for Workplace Learning (WPL100) and Education (EDU100) and the Movers and Shakers.
Looking at the Movers and Shakers, I see WolframAlpha has crept in at 198 on the Top Tools list, so I wasn’t the only one who voted for it! Quite rightly Google Forms is another new entry; I think my own vote for Google (search) was actually also a vote for Google Docs / Google Apps for Education / Google Calendar! Google forms is such a good way to collect feedback. See for example slides 63-83 for Student Feedback on Low Stakes Testing. where I used this form.
Noted in the Movers and Shakers list are tools which have jumped up more than 15 places. Trello is indeed good for organising information and is easy to use for collaboration. With my interest in retrieval practice I want to revisit Quizlet. Also on my list is One Note, though not to replace Evernote but complement it. More to explore – Canva and I see Richard Byrne has posted on Canva new features.