Jane's E-Learning Pick of the Day

My predictions for Top Tools in 2009

I have been recently asked which tools I think will make it onto next year's Top 100 Tools list.  Here are 10 that I think have a good chance.

1  Cooliris

Cooliris transforms your browser into a lightning fast, cinematic way to discover the Web - Cooliris

2  Dimdim

Dimdim lets you deliver synchronised live presentations, whiteboards and web pages while sharing voice and video over the Internet, with no download required - Dimdim

3  Evernote

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere - Evernote

4  Friendfeed

Friendfeed helps you discover and discuss interesting stuff that your friends and family find on the web - Friendfeed

5  Posterous

Posterous is the place to post everything - Posterous

6  Qik

Qik enables you to share your moments live with your friends, family and the world—right from your mobile phone! - Qik

7  Screen Toaster

Screen Toaster lets you record your screen in one click and then embed your videos on your blog or web page - Screen Toaster

8 Seesmic

Seesmic provides anyone with an innovative way to communicate and connect online through video conversation.  Record a video directly on Seesmic's website, mobile phone or upload an existing video straight from your computer or link to a video posted on a social network - Seesmic

9  SlideRocket

Sliderocket lets you quickly make stunning presentations, manage a library of related slides and assets, share them securely with colleagues, and measure how they're used. - Sliderocket

10  WiZiQ

WiZiQ is a place where you can teach and learn using an easy-to-use virtual classroom - WiZiQ

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Anyone else want to make a prediction about the tool(s) they think will reach the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2009 list?  If so, please leave them in a comment below.

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UPDATES

10 Jan 2009: See how my predictions did in the 2nd Crunchies Awards

15 Jan 2009: ScreenToaster launches new version and gets lots of good reviews

My review of 2008: Part II

For the second part of my review of 2008, here is an overview of my personal year - with some added comments about what's coming up in 2009.  In addition to writing daily posts here at this blog and working on consultancy projects for clients, I did a few other things ...

	E-Learning predictions 2008 started with the usual requests for predictions for the year.   kineo asked me and a number of people for their thoughts, as did Lisa Neal, which she published, in eLearn magazine. I've just been asked for some predictions for 2009, so it was interesting to go back and review what I said will happen this year - some I got right.  Let's see if I am as successful this time.
	Top 100 Tools for Learning In late January I presented the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2007 list at the Learning Technologies conference. although by then I had in fact already opened up entries for the Top 10 Tools for Learning 2008.  In April I produced the Spring 2008 List based on 155 contrbutions.  I re-opened the list during the summer and by the end of October,  223 learning professionals from around the world had contributed their Top 10 Tools for Learning.  I finalised the Top 100 Tools for Learning 2008 list in early November and created a slideshare of the results which I put on Slideshare. This has now been viewed over 18,500 times.  I also categorised the Top 100 tools in, what I called, the Toolset for Learning 2009. In March/April 2009 I will open for entries for your Top 10 Tools for Learning 2009, in order to produce a Spring 2009 Top 100 Tools List,  and then again in late summer 2009 in order to finalise the list in early November 2009.
	25 FREE Tools every learning professional should have in their Toolbox In March I wrote an article for the April 2008 edition of e-Learning Age magazine called 25 Tools every learning professional should have in their Toolbox - and all for free.  It became so popular that I a turned it into a resource in itself and wrote Mini Tutorials for each of the tools.  I also set up the 25 Tools Ning community to support it, which was featured on the Ning blog in June 2008.  The 25 Tools community now has over 550 members  I have also given the 25 Tools presentation a number of times this year at different conferencess, e.g. ALT-C in Leeds in September, at the Learning And Skills webinar in September, and at the online Learning Trends & Innovations conference in November.  In August I uploaded the slideset to Slideshar, where on 27 August it became Slideshare's Slideshow of the Day.  Since then it has been viewed nearly 10,000 times. In the Spring I will update this resource to reflect the outcome of the Top 100 Tools Spring 2009 list.
	iTouch Learning In May 2008 I began investigating the use of the iPod Touch for learning and performance support purposes, and started to put together a list of the top web apps and optmised sites for the iPod Touch for learning and performance support purposes in a  new section of the Centre's website, called iTouch Learning
	Social Media & Learning In  early 2008 as there was increasing interest in the ways that social media tools were helping to generate a new phase of learning - known variously as Learning 2.0, E-Learning 2.0, Collaborative Learning and Social Learning - I decided to change my title from E-Learning Consultant to Social Media & Learning Consultant, to reflect the fact that my focus was now on helping organisations understand and implement social media tools for learning and performance support. I also set up a separate section of my website, Social Learning, where over the year I have been aggregating a number of articles and resources I have written, including a presentation "Using social media for learning and performance support", a Model for Engagement with Social Media, a Quiz to profile your engagement with social media, as well as a number of magazine articles: 10 Tips for successfully implementing social media for learning and performance support in the workplace,  12-step plan to getting engaged with social media (for elearning age magazine in September), and a 3-part series of articles for Inside Learning Technologies magazine:  Part 1 (Social bookmarking, file sharing and social networking) (in October), Part 2 (Microblogging services (in December) and Part 3 (Collaborative working and Learning (for the January conference edition) together with a number of other resources (mentioned below).
	Engaging with Social Media In July I produced a more substantial online learning resource, which I initially called "Engaging with Social Media" although later renamed to "How to do more on the Internet for free".  It  was intended to help individuals experience and/or increase their engagement with a wide variety of social media tools and was based on 40 activities around using social media tools.  In addition to the online materials I also produced a PDF version. There has been enormous interest in this resource so I am currently revising it, and will be relaunching it in January 2009 as "An Introduction to Social Learning".
	Directory of Learning Professionals on Twitter In September I compiled a list of 100+ learning professionals on Twitter - to help those who were looking to make connections with others - but soon renamed it to the Directory of Learning Professionals on Twitter as hundreds of people wanted to appear on it. I receive daily email requests from those want to be included on the list, and there are nearly 700 names on it. Let me know if you want to appear on it too. I also have been maintaining a List of Twitter Applications and Twitter Reading List (part of the Library of Reading Lists).
	Directory of Social Networks for Learnng Professionals In October I compiled a list of social networking sites suitable for those working in education and workplace learning. There are nearly 100 networks on the list including my 25 Tools community as well as the Workplace Learnng 2.0 Ning Community I set up in May for anyone who wanted to discuss anything related to Learning 2.0 in the Workplace.
	ELearning Guild's E-Learning 2.0 Report During the summer I was invited to join the team working on the E-Learning Guild's E-Learning 2.0 report. The team comprised Steve Wexler, Tony Karrer, Michele Martin, Brent Schlenker, Mark Oehlert and Sanjay Parker. We all wrote articles to go alongside the report, and my article Understanding today's learnerss - which looked at the generational and technological effects on today's new breed of learners - was published in September just prior to the Report itself. In November I attended the E-Learning Guild's conference DevLearn in San Jose, California and helped Tony Karrer run the E-Learning 2.0 Pre-Conference Symposium. In March 2009 Mark and I will presenting the Learning in a Web 2.0 World Pre-Conference Symposium at the eLearning Guild's Annual Gathering in Orlando, Florida.
	Directory of Learning Tools All year I continued to add tools to The Directory of Learning Tools and it now contains well over 2,500 tools, of which over 2/3 are free.  This is where it all started ... The Directory is therefore an important C4LPT resource, and I will continue to maintain it during 2009, so let me know if there are any tools that you would like to add to it.

My review of 2008

My 100 favourite resources (articles, postings, PDFs, presentations, etc) about learning tools and technologies in 2008

I was taking a look at all the resources that I had collected during 2008 in my LearnTech Library as well as those that I had posted in the LearnTech News, to identify those that I particularly enjoyed, that inspired me, made me think and/or I just found very useful. Of course, there were many, but I finally narrowed my list down to 100.

I then fed all the titles into Wordle to generate a word cloud and identify trends in this collection of my favourite resources. Here it is - my review of 2008 - click on the image for the full-size image.

And, if you want to see the list of my 100 favourite resources in 2008 - listed chronologically by the month in which they appeared - go to Review of 2008: My favourite 100 articles

NORAD tracks Santa

Each year NORAD (the bi-national U.S.-Canadian military organization responsible for the aerospace and maritime defense of the United States and Canada) tracks Santa's route around the world.  You can also track his flight in Google Earth!  And this year you can also track Santa using Twitter - @noradsanta.

NORAD tracks Santa

Happy Christmas to you all!  See you again on Monday 29 December.

Tweet of the Year

"Tweet of the Year" - what's it all about?  This is what they say

Not all tweets are created equal, and some might be better than others. For the fun of it this page tries to collect and show the best of them all. It shall prove once and for all that the twitterverse contains value beyond the general nonsense. Please help us in finding those genius tweets of 2008!

#tweetoftheyear rules: tweet a link to the best tweet of 2008, add #tweetoftheyear and up to one optional #category.

One vote per twitter user is counted. The latest vote is used, so you can change your vote by just casting a new vote.

Tweet of the Year 2008

Learn Photoshop in one week

Looking for a holiday project? Then this three part series from Elite by Design in September 2008 will show you how to master Photoshop in one week.

How to master Photoshop in one week

LearnTech News Feed Update: 21 December

Here are 5 recent items from my LearnTech news feed:

1. TwittBot - post to multiple accounts or multiple people to one account
2. 100 top sites for the year ahead The Guardian's latest selection finds that location-based services, work-anywhere collaboration and video are prominent
3. Tiddly Backpack -it's a portable, personal wiki
4. Mobile Wikipedia - Wikipedia on your mobile phone
5. The Year in Tweets - 10 Most Memorable Twitter Moments of 2008, from Mashable

Do you want to keep up to date with more (e-)learning resources that I find, then you can susbcribe to the LearnTech news feed via RSS or Twitter.

Yonkly

Create your own microblogging network. Features include:

• Use your own domain
• Advanced Control Panel
• Make it unique with your own skin
• Threaded conversations
• Picture sharing
• Background Picture
• Search friends and messages
• Advanced user interface
• Widgets-enabled sidebar

Yonkly

Manymoon

Simplify your worklife.  Use Manymoon to:

• Manage your private and shared tasks
• Find out what other people are working on
• Simple tracking and completion of projects
• Collaborate with co-workers, customers and partners
• Turn emails into tasks
• Attach Google Docs to tasks and projects

It's free to sign up.

Manymoon

Slideshare's PowerPoint Ribbon

Are you a PowerPoint user who uploads presentations to Slideshare, then you will love this new widget:  the Slideshare ribbon for PowerPont.  For more information take a look at this presentation:

Meet the SlideShare ribbon for PowerPoint

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: powerpoint microsoft)

To download the ribbon, click the Download Now button on the last slide of the presentation