Building a personal learning toolkit

OER Workshop Foreword

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This lesson allows you explore and experiment with personal technologies for learning. You can build your own personal learning toolkit based on your explorations.

Before we explore the OER world further, it would be a good idea for you to begin to select tools with which to build your own personal learning tool kit. With these tools you'll be able to explore the Internet, keep notes and capture ideas from web sites you visit.

Becoming a networked teacher and learner

Dr. Alec Couros of the University of Regina proposes that teachers need to become "network learners" themselves.

Click on the diagram to see a larger version, its source location and the license associated with the image.

The Couros diagram of the networked teacher illustrates the many ways that teachers interact with students, colleagues, peers and other resources, both human and digital across the Internet. In each case, these interactions are software and network-enabled.

What is important is for networked teachers to assemble a personal learning toolkit of software applications that will allow them to communicate with peers, assemble and manage digital resources, publish and share digital resources with others.

Your personal learning toolkit

One of the ways to begin to assemble your own personal toolkit is to seek advice from others who may have more knowledge. Another way to assemble your toolkit is to explore free or open source tools that might be useful to you by searching for them using the Internet.

A shortcut would be to explore collections of tools that other educators have found useful in the context of becoming a networked teacher and/or learner.

One useful resource is the OER Handbook that can be found on the WikiEducator web site.

It has a section on composing OERs that list many useful open source software packages that could be valuable resources in a personal toolkit for networked teachers.

Included are lists of software tools for:

Audio
Images
Learning support systems
Office tools
Web authoring
Video
Mobile access

A very good starting point would be to download and install a set of open source Office tools such as those available free from OpenOffice.org.

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Activity: Exploring personal learning tools

For each of the categories below, explore the suggested free web-based tool to find out if it would fit your personal style.

If so, consider making the tool part of your personal toolkit. If not, use the Internet to search for tools like the ones below to determine if there are others that might better suit your style or context.

Functional category	Open source tools	Free to use tools
Document creation and sharing	OpenOffice	Google Docs
Browse the web and clip web pages for future reference	nevernote	Evernote
Research tool for organizing bibliographic references	JabRef	Zotero
Social networking, micro blogging tool for real-time connection to peers	identi.ca	Twitter
Social bookmarking service to share useful web bookmarks with peers	freelish	Diigo
Blogging service for posting articles, journal entries, notes and images	WordPress	Blogger
Internet telephone and web presence tool for one-to-one or small group discussions	linphone	Skype
Online web conferencing and white-boarding with peers or students	BigBlueButton	WizIQ

References

Couros, A. (2008). The networked educator. Available: http://www.flickr.com/photos/courosa/2922421696/

Wiley, D., Ed. (2008). OER Handbook. Available: http://wikieducator.org/OER_Handbook/educator_version_one