25 Tools for Online Professional Development

Compiled by Jane Hart @ www.janehart.com

"These are the 25 current must-have free tools. Each Tool activity comprises a number of short, simple tasks to help you find out more about the technology behind each tool, the tool itself and why it is so popular, how to try out the tool and reflect on its use for your own teaching and learning and for productivity and performance support. Many of the tool activities are inter-related, so you will also be using other tools for different tasks."

	The bare essentials These are the basic tools you need to have
	FIREFOX	More than just a browser with 100s of extensions available to provide an enormous range of extra functionality not found with other browsers.
	GMAIL/GOOGLE MAIL	No more worrying about an email client on your desktop and dealing with spam and viruses - and tons of free storage space.
	SKYPE	An easy way of not only text messaging your contacts but also free voice calls - with low charges out to landlines.
	Keep yourself up-to-date These tools will help you keep up to date with what people are doing and what's happening in the e-learning world
	DELICIOUS	Store your bookmarks online, tag them and share them with others, students, colleagues and so on
	GOOGLE READER	Subscribe to website and blog feeds and the news is delivered automatically to you. Effortless!
	TWITTER	If you want to stay in touch with people no matter where you are or what you’re doing.
	Manage your own productivity Here are a variety of tools to help you with your day-to-day working and learning life
	GOOGLE CALENDAR	Don't keep your calendar to yourself, share it and make scheduling events an easier process.
	GOOGLE DOCS	An online suite of office tools for personal use or to collaborate with other. It can read in Microsoft Office documents too.
	FREEMIND	For organising your thoughts or just brainstorming.
	iGOOGLE	Aggregate all your resources, mail, RSS feeds, etc, in one place.
	Set up a blog, website and/or wiki You won't necessarily need all three; but here are the ways to get a web presence
	WORDPRESS	Blogging tool for both personal or professional use with many plugins available for it.
	NVU	A versatile web authoring to build web pages and web sites..
	PBWIKI	A wiki tool to create editable websites for collaborative writing and working.
	Share content with others Make use of existing engaging content by using these three tools. You can use them to host and share your own content too.
	SLIDESHARE	Upload presentations, tag them and share them with others. Synchronise them with an audio file to create a narrated presentation.
	FLICKR	Host your personal or professional picture collection, and share them with friends, colleagues and others.
	YOUTUBE	A large collection of shareable videos - host your own there tool
	Build content and share it with others These tools will help you create additional content and share it with others.
	VOICETHREAD	Create a slideshow around images and invite comments (audio or text) from others.
	AUDACITY	Record and edit audio and, with the extra encoder, convert your audio files into MP3 podcasts
	JING	An “always-ready” program that instantly captures and shares images and video.
	POLLDADDY	Want to get some quick feedback? Set up a poll, and track responses.
	Bring people together For live broadcasts or meetings or for socialising, these 3 tools are key
	YUGMA	For small meetings of up to 10 people, to whiteboard, annotate and share files. You can even use Skype.
	USTREAM	Live interactive video broadcasting to a global audience. All it takes is a camera and an internet connection.
	NING	Create and customise a private network/community for a group of like-minded people, large or small.
	Develop and manage courses If you want to create and manage formal learning content (courses, programmes etc), then these tools are important.
	EXE	Create SCORM-compliant learning content that doesn't require you to be proficient in HTML or XML markup.
	MOODLE	Host a complete course or program or simply provide the user authentication mechanism to other training materials.