TOP 10 TOOLS 2009
Carol Skyring

I’m Founder & CEO, LearnTel - an experienced educator and businesswoman who has been involved in the design, application and effective use of eCollaboration since 1986. I hold a Dip T; Grad Dip Dist Ed; B Ed & M Ed (Research) - my thesis investigated the nature of interaction in videoconferencing. I’m currently undertaking an Education Doctorate to investigate the use of microblogging for professional learning. My blog is at: videoconference.edublogs.org

Carol's Top 10 Tools as at 23 February 2009

1. Plurk - without doubt this is my favourite tool. I’m connected to an amazing group of educators in many countries who freely share their thoughts & ideas & come to the rescue when anyone is looking for a particular resource.
2. Twitter -  I originally saw Twitter as a useless tool and am on the record for saying so. However, I’m also connected to a great group of people on Twitter who freely share their ideas.
3. Netvibes -  this manages my life! It aggregates all of my RSS feeds & also has a number of tools from listing tasks to searching for photos & videos.
4. Pbwiki - I have wikis for everything from the business plan to project planning to my doctorate. This is a fabulous way to work collaboratively and share files with distributed teams.
5. Ning - the app that allows you to build your own social network. I belong to numerous Ning groups where like-minded people exchange ideas and resources.
6. Google Docs - I’ve really been using Google docs in a big way in the past year. We’ve used them for shared ‘Word’ documents that we can work on collaboratively and also as ‘Forms’ to gather information from people - which then goes automatically into a spreadsheet.
7. FriendFeed: a social-network-activity aggregator that acts like a funnel for all the updates from my various networks and brings them into one master stream, relieving me of the responsibility of visiting a dozen or more sites.
8. Slideshare - allows me to post my slide shows for others to see, but, more importantly, allows me to find great slideshows from others. There’s some amazing information there and all free of charge.
9. Scribd - where I place my documents so others can read them online or download them. It’s also a great place to find articles and papers written by others.
10. CoverItLIve - we experimented with Cover it Live’s new live blogging tool for the Learning Technologies Conference this year. It worked a treat and allowed those both on and off site to get a running commentary of selected sessions and to interact real-time with our live blogger.