top tools 2022

Every year, Jane Hart asks, “What are the most popular digital tools for learning and why?”. This is the sixteenth year Jane asked this question — and compiled the results into a valuable resource — and this is my eleventh year responding.

My responses have not changed too much from the past few years.

WordPress remains on top as it powers this blog, my online workshops. Also Slack has moved up as it will be the platform for our PBCC community.

I continue to use Feedly and Pinboard as ways to organize my online resources.

Zoom remains important because I have not travelled for business for the past three years and doubt I will again soon, so video conferencing is critical for my learning and work. Zoom still beats the competition in terms of usability.

Finally I have added two new learning platforms because I am starting to actively observe nature in our area. We have attracted several types of birds — catbirds, purple finches, goldfinches, cardinals, American redstarts, chickadees, etc. — and I use Merlin to identify them and learn more. I also use Seek by iNaturalist to identify plants and other animals. I became interested in identifying milkweed in our area as that is the only source of food for the monarch butterfly, which is now endangered.

So these are my top 10 tools for 2022.

WordPress

Zoom

Slack

Tweetbot

Keynote

Preview

Feedly

Pinboard

Merlin

Seek