This report has been linked to in many edu blogs. There are some cool tools listed and the links are taking me off to lots more interesting places!
However let’s be a bit more critical about the statistics and who the tools are appropriate for.
I’ve done a very quick analysis of this report. The sample group was so small it meant that a product only had to get 3 votes to be in the Top 100.
109 people were surveyed; therefore 1090 tools were submitted producing a list of just over 400 tools. The Top 100 were collected from those that were listed 3 times or more. Not a large survey and not a lot of tools. The top tool (Firefox) was mentioned 61 times. Most items were mentioned less than 10 times! The list creators are quite open about the statistics and I do not for one moment think they intended the list to be quoted in the way that some are quoting it – as the definitive list of Top Learning Tools. Its an interesting list of what successful people are using.
The contributors were mainly from the corporate/business world and in some cases were the developers of the programs they listed (well, why wouldn’t they?). The next largest groups were university employees and education/ICT consultants. I found around a dozen contributors who were employed in secondary schools, one at middle school and none at primary or early childhood level.
I got suspicious when I read that PowerPoint was at #5 and Inspiration was 72nd equal (with 3 votes!) and that site performance monitoring tools, anti virus programs, mail clients, FTP apps and HTML editors were listed among the tools. So are they Learning Tools or tools useful in the implementation of learning?
The site obtains revenue from Google Ads and Amazon and there are also a number of “sponsor” ads for products that are listed. Developers and promoters of products in the list are now using this list as a reference in advertising their products on their own sites. There’s some communal back scratching going on. That is all fine, they’re not trying to deceive us – it’s the way that other folk are using these statistics that concerns me. Reading the data first hand you can make the connections but quoting them out of context can be misleading.
Is it an interesting list? Yes. Are the products that are listed good? Undoubtedly. Is this list an indication of the best that’s available out there? No. Is this a list of the best tools a teacher could use in their classroom? Definitely not. In fact it’s totally disingenuous to advertise a product as a world leading elearning resource for use in schools because it appears on this list – with 3 votes!
Let’s be a little more critical about statistics. Let’s have bigger sample groups. Let’s have sample groups that have no vested interests. Let’s quote surveys that relate to our field of operation.
Let’s ask classroom teachers for a list of their Top 10 Learning Tools.
