I know that I am a bit late for a ‘Best of 2008′ but I thought summing up what I thought were the best bits of ‘technology’ I had used (and would recommend to learners and teachers alike) in 2008 would lead nicely onto what I am looking forward to in 2009 (particulary as all of the delights of the ‘Consumer Electronics Show 2009′ have been dropping into my RSS reader over the last few days). So here goes …
Best of 2008 (IMHO)
(not the latest technologies but ones I have found almost invaluable in 2008)
RSS readers – mainly Outlook 2007 (but Google Reader for the weekends) … where would I be in terms of keeping up to date with what is going on in the worlds of technology and learning if I hadn’t discovered that I could set up RSS feeds in Outlook … somewhere I visit daily during the week?
Shared, online document creation and editing - having tried a number of ways of sharing creation and editing of documents at a distance, Google Docs seems to be the most reliable service for me. It also has so much about it that is familiar that it is easy to learn to use and to keep coming back to. Being an iGoogle user it is also great to be able to have my GoogleDocs visible at a glance (this is my last comment about Google … although if Google Lively had still been around things would have been different 
).
Online tool for presenting collections of information in a viewable way – i.e. Moodle ‘Books’. RSC Wales use ‘Moodle’ as a way of sharing information and resources with you in an easily accessible way. For those of you who know Moodle well you will know that ‘Books’ have been round for a while … but as with any technology, it is only useful when you have a real purpose for using it … have a look at one of our ‘books’, which presents a collection of stuff from several sessions with Coleg Gwent learners where we were trying to find out what they thought of the some of the handheld technology we have been evaluating.
I could go on but having given it some thought I think these are the 3 key ‘technologies’ of 2008 that have made me able to work more effectively.
Technologies I am looking forward to in 2009
(either promoting to our learning providers or finding out more about)
Free, portable applications in an easy to access format - ‘AccessApps’ is a collection of over 50 free technologies that have been put together in an easily accessible package for use by learners/teachers and anyone else who would find them useful. This was around in 2008 but I have only just got to grips with what a fantastic resource this could potentially be.
Visual online bookmarks – a website I found today that adds a visual element to an online bookmarking service, like delicious.
And then there are just a few of the ‘technologies’ on show at CES with the potential to be useful to support learning:
… and just so that Mac fans don’t feel left out …
So many good resources already out there … and so much more to look forward too …
