A couple of week’s ago I posted about Jane Hart and an excellent article she had written about 25 Tools every Learning Professional should have in their Toolbox – and all for FREE! which is due to be published in elearning age magazine in April. Jane’s post generated much interest so she decided to take things further and has now offered a Professional Development program;
“intended for those working in education, workplace learning or professional development who want to broaden their horizons in terms of the wide range of technologies and tools available for learning and performance support in a very practical way by getting to grips with 25 key tools. “
All of the tools that Jane has included are free and she has provided activities to help with an understanding of each tool. They include Skype, Jing, Delicious, Voicethread, Google Docs, Twitter, Slideshare and many others. You need to have a user name and password to access these activities and can sign in at Jane’s site. This is a great opportunity for educators to introduce this to their workplaces to help bring along staff who have little knowledge of Web 2.0 tools and how they can be used to support learning. I’ve applied for a user name and password as there are a couple of tools there that I haven’t used before. Jane has also set up a 25tools community where, “users can share thoughts, experiences and resources well as get help and advice from other Community members.” A great idea – one of the stumbling blocks I think people have when trying new things is not having someone to help them out when they need it. If you want to get a number of staff involved and have your own secure discussion area for your staff to use this can be done for a small fee (not disclosed at this stage).
Jane Hart is doing wonderful things to support the introduction of Web 2.0 tools to the wider community. She is currently collating a list of the 100 top tools for learning. To do this she has asked educators to submit their top 10 lists with some explanation as to why they they find these tools useful. I’ve contributed my Top 10, as have 146 others. Take a read of people’s top 10 tools – I’ve scanned quite a few and have discovered new and useful tools as a result.
Lucacept - intercepting the Web 
Hi Jenny,
I was only just thinking how nice it would be if we could trade off half an hour to an hour with another educator, swapping knowledge about one person’s understanding of Diigo with another’s understanding of Google Sites, for instance.
I’ve got plenty to share but also plenty that I don’t know, and would find it easy to Skype with someone for 30 minutes to trade some know-how.
Not that I’m necessarily advocating this, as I say I was just thinking it would be nice to have a site where you go to sign up for a ‘shared learning’ experience.
It’s great to see other people providing really useful sites like this one.