Jane Hart, of the Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies, has published her annual list of Top Tools for Learning. The list, released on 24 September 2018, has been compiled from the results of the 12th Annual Digital Learning Tools Survey. Jane Hart’s analysis includes details of the contributors as well as her commentary on trends.
Like last year, she has three sub-lists including Top 100 Tools for Education. As Jane indicates only 23% of the votes came from the Academic Sector, so it is interesting to look at the sub-lists as well as the overall list. The sub-lists are:
- Top 100 Tools for Personal & Professional Learning 2018 (PPL 100)
- Top 100 Tools for Workplace Learning 2018 (WPL 100)
- Top 100 Tools for Education 2018 (EDU 100)
The infographic made available by Jane Hart is a four-page pdf which lists the overall 200 top tools and also the top 100 tools on each of the sub-lists.
It is fascinating to note the tools which have made it onto all 12 lists, as well as looking at the enduring tools over the last 5 years or so. Using the 2007-18 A-Z I thought I would have a look at these and created a spreadsheet to see which tools are in all 12 lists, also an average position over the last 3, 5 and 7 years.
Looking at the new entries on the 2018 list, I am delighted to see a personal favourite, WolframAlpha which has finally made it onto the top 100 list for Education!
Looking further at the Top 100 Tools for Education (filter EDU100, note you can choose to show all 100 on the list) I see some personal favourites!
(Top Tools 2018 – Education– for an Excel Spreadsheet).
Excel is quite rightly highly placed. I regularly use Excel resources; just a few examples of some favourites:
- Mike Hadden’s Excel Files
- STEM earning – Descriptive Statistics
- Dynamic Maths – David Watkins
- Virtual Textbooks – STEM Learning
See STEM Learning, part of the A Level (16+) Resources series.
A few more for investigation …
Kahoot (Classroom response tool) is very easy to use and free for teachers and students. In a few minutes, I created a quiz on Directed Numbers … (not very exciting – just a test, very easy to create.) 
Another popular quizzing tool I know some of my colleague’s use is Quizlet.
Seeing Padlet (online discussion board) ascending the list reminded me of this very easy to use tool. I shall try this with Year 7!
Unsplash – beautiful free photos to do anything you like with!
- Photo by Marivi Pazos on Unsplash
Apart from illustrating Unsplash, I can have pictures of flowers to illustrate a mathematical connection! From Science News reading Fibonacci’s Missing Flowers we discover that the most common number of petals is five and whilst there are many flowers with the number of petals a Fibonacci number there are also flowers with four, six, seven or nine petals!