It’s been only a couple of months since edshelf.com launched, and only a few weeks since we introduced the ability to create your own collections of tools, and already we’re seeing some interesting trends on our site.
One is: educators love collections! You all have created nearly a thousand collections already. Wow!
Another is: looking at the number of times a tool has been added to a collection gives us an interesting proxy into that tool’s popularity. And we aren’t the only ones to catch this:
Youtube Teachers is in 434 user collections on @edshelf, Google sites is in 383, @educreations is in 133. A new measuring stick? #edtech
— Jack West (@JackCWest) June 6, 2012
Caveat: though we have thousands of members and are in hundreds of schools, this is just a fraction of all the schools in the US, much less the world. The majority of our members are also tech-savvy early adopters, which may or may not map to the average educator. We also don’t have every single piece of edtech out there yet. So take all of this with a grain of salt.
With that in mind, here are the current 20 top tools, going by the number of times each has been added to a collection:
Four of Google’s products make it into the top ten, YouTube Teachers, Google Sites, Google Docs, and Google Earth. Surprisingly, Google Apps isn’t up there, but that may be because setting it up is difficult to impossible for most teachers (it requires domain verification, which tends to fall under the purview of an IT coordinator).
I’m pleasantly surprised that Dropbox is so high on the list. Looks like file sharing is a much-needed product by educators.
Prezi also surprised me. I see it fairly often in company presentations, but didn’t realize it was being used in classrooms this much too.
Audacity is great. It’s been around for more than a decade and has a great price tag: Free.
I didn’t expect to see Wordle on this list either, but it’s good to see so many educators playing around with word visualizations.
Earlier this year, our team went through the ImagineK12 startup accelerator. This is a program focused on helping education technology companies get started and grow quickly. I’m glad to see a bunch of other ImagineK12 companies on this list too: Socrative, instaGrok, ClassDojo, and Educreations. Way to go guys!
I’m not surprised to see Evernote for Schools, TED, Edmodo, Twitter, and Khan Academy in this top twenty list though. All are popular tools with strong followings.
And completing the list are two applications from Apple, Pages and Keynote.
As I mentioned earlier, this is not a scientific study. If anything, this represents what early adopter educators use more than the general educator population. It will be interesting to see how this list changes as more members join edshelf as well.
What do you think? What are your top education technologies?
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