I'm a teacher trainer in geography and e-learning for the School of Education Amsterdam, part of INHolland University of Applied Sciences. I also work as a fellow-researcher for the INHolland Research and Innovation Center eLearning. Right now I'm participating in a Dutch-Australian research into the Students' Voices: what do students think about using ICT and e-learning for learning in school and private lives. I'm trying to do my part in education by  training the students to become teachers 2.0 and 3.0. Sometimes against the odds. I write a personal blog about education and my learning experiences, trying to figure out what's the best way of learning for myself, at Leervlak.nl (in Dutch). 

Jeroen's Top 10 Tools as at 18 May 2009

1. Twitter
   I use Twitter to share my thoughts, ideas, information with others and to learn or get inspired by others. I love the way professionals use Twitter as a backchannel during conferences, using tags, adding depth to presentations and discussions. Microblogging is the informal learning tool for me.

2. Delicious
   I’m constantly adding webpages or blogposts to my Delicious. Information I can use for presentations, lectures, blogposts and papers. My student’s are used of finding a link to a specific Delicious tag in their ‘required reading’ list. I teach my students to search in Delicious as an alternative to Google. I like the collecting aspect of saving websites to Delicious (more, more!)

3. NetNewsWire
   My RSS-feedreader for Mac OS X and iPhone. A daily ritual. I use the feeds for learning about education and e-learning, to get inspired by other learning professionals.  NetNewsWire synchronizes my feeds between desktop, iPhone app and web. It doesn’t matter which platform I use, I’m always up to date.

4. iPhone
   If we’re going for this ubiquitous learning thing, let’s do it in style! Internet access 24/7. Checking my e-mail, Twitter, reading RSS feeds, creating notes in Evernote, using location based apps for public transport etc. I use my camera for taking pictures of events or to ’scan’ notes which I post on Twitter or Evernote. Oh, and of course the phone conversations. Don’t forget the phone conversations.

5. Evernote
   Almost everything I write starts in Evernote. Blogposts, papers, lessonplans, etc. Even when I’m making notes on a piece of paper during a meeting, or scribble some ideas on a beernapkin, I take a photo with my iPhone camera and ’scan’  it into Evernote for further use. I’m using Twitter to tweet ideas, thoughts and information straight to Evernote. All my notes are synchronized between Evernote for desktop, iPhone app and web.

6. Safari
   My favorite browser for desktop and iPhone. Fast and clean. I use it for my Google searches and my favorite button is “Add to Delicious”.

7. Wordpress (self-hosted)
   I use WordPress for my blog. I started a blog after I started using Twitter, the microblogging inspired me to work out thoughts and concepts in more than 140 characters. I’m keeping a blog to work out concepts and ideas about education and e-learning and to share information with colleagues and other learning professionals. It’s becoming my tool for reflection and creating a sort of digital portfolio.

8. Sharepoint
   The intranet environment in my School is build with SharePoint.  I use it to share information with my colleagues and students. I create different sites to support projects and classes, to facilitatie co-construction of knowledge and reflection.

9. Keynote
   I use Keynote for presentations. I think it works very intuitive, and the results look more professional than PowerPoint. When necessary I’ll convert the presentations to PowerPoint or straight to SlideShare. I used to convert them ready for iPod of iPhone, but I stopped doing that. Students didn’t use them.

10. Word
    I’ve worked with OpenOffice for Mac for a couple of months, but returned to Microsoft Office. And the main reason was that I missed the “review” options in Word, which I use with my colleagues when we are collaborating on reports or when I’m reviewing student’s papers.