One of the best online resources for all learners and educators is Jane Hart’s website, Centre for Learning and Performance Technologies . The directory which she provides lists “over 2,000 tools for learning and working in education and the workplace”.

This is a website that really is for everybody. It seems that no matter what you would like to do, you will find some help here to do it. For instance there is a long list of document creation tools of all kinds – most are free; many are simpler to use than Microsoft Word; and many allow collaboration and sharing. These are obviously tools that can be used by teachers, students, other professionals, and anyone else who needs a word processing program. Similarly, there are lists of presentation tools, spreadsheet tools, blogging and website tools, and personal productivity tools.

For teachers, there are also lists of tools that they can use in their classrooms whether they teach in physical classrooms or teach distance learning classes. Some of these are learning management systems, tools for creating quizzes, and conferencing tools. Websites such as TED and Teacher Tube are listed that help teachers to learn and be inspired. Various tools to help set up group projects for students are listed as well as many other collaboration and sharing tools.

For students, all of the previously mentioned tools can be useful. In addition there are links to dictionaries, various tools to help in creating a bibliography, and a link to Quicklyst which helps you to take outline type notes to help you structure your ideas for easier studying. There are good websites listed for doing research such as Google Scholar, RefSeek, and Questia. Many listings for sites with videos, tutorials, and sites where you can learn anything by asking questions of others help you to learn anything you need or want to know.

As well as the Directory on this website, there is a page titled “Jane’s Pick of the Day” in which she shares links each day along with a brief summary to resources on the web which she has shared on Twitter. For example one day she shared the link to an article about how the iPad is changing education. Today it was a link to an article about TED’s new initiative to help teachers create lesson plans based on TED’s videos.

Another page on this site is a list of the “100 Top Tools for Learning” for the past 5 years. The list is “compiled from the top 10 Tools lists” of hundreds of educators from around the world. The tools can be ones that a person uses personally for their own learning or ones that they use to help others learn. It is therefore, another list on this site which can be used by everyone since we are all learners and would therefore benefit from many of those tools.

Overall this is a great site since it can be so useful to everyone who is interested in any kind of a learning tool. I often visit this site and each time I spend more time than I should checking out various tools and how they may be useful to me. Anyone who enjoys learning or who is presently a student or teacher will surely be able to find something on this website to help them reach their learning goals.

I do feel that this is a very worthwhile site to visit but I have no connection to Jane Hart or the site in any way. I simply came across it through a web search a couple of years ago.