Jane Hart compiles a list every year of what people find to be their best web tools for learning. Voting closes on 27 September. Here are my top tools this year, with last year’s position shown in brackets.
9 (new): Wikimedia Commons is a great source for copyright free images to use in presentations.
8 (new): Feedly is my new feed reader, now that Google Reader has been shut down.
7 (8): Flickr: Still a great way to share photos online. I like the feature that automatically creates images in multiple sizes. Though the deletion of Pro accounts, for which I paid two years in advance, shows that Yahoo! (the owner) does not really care about its customers, only advertisers.
6 (10): Google Plus: I find G+ is very good for deep conversations and the live Hangouts feature is still a killer app, even though the features and interface keep changing, showing that the platform is built by engineers, for engineers.
5 (5): Keynote: Apple’s presentation application has enabled me to improve my slide presentations, through its simplicity and lack of clip art.
4 (9): Slideshare: A handy way to share presentations so that people can view them before or instead of downloading them.
3 (3): Diigo: Social bookmarks are a quick way for me to save a web page and find it easily (Diigo allows me to do an auto backup to Delicious).
2 (4): Twitter: Next to my blog, Twitter is my best learning tool and allows me to stay connected to a diverse network.
1 (1): WordPress: It powers my blog, which is the core of my self-directed learning and online reflection. It’s easy to use, has a huge community, and there are many plug-ins and additions available.