Most people who know me well are aware that I'm a person who is quite motivated by streaks. Whether it is my current 93 days going strong in the Bend stretching app, or my current 1,027-day streak going with closing my rings of my Apple Watch, I enjoy seeing how far I can go.
Sadly, I haven't done quite as well with keeping my streak with votes for Jane Hart's annual Top 100 Tools for Learning. I was too late to be included in the votes for last year, but decided to write up my 2025 Top Tools post, regardless. Before that, I had posts for the following years: 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022, and 2024.
My Method
Each year, I write up my top ten without looking at the prior year's post, lest I be overly influenced by what the prompt evoked in past years. I center my thinking around Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) framework each time. Harold Jarche defines PKM as:
Personal knowledge mastery (PKM) is a set of processes, individually constructed, to help each of us make sense of our world and work more effectively. PKM keeps us afloat in a sea of information — guided by professional communities and buoyed by social networks.
When I consider which tools fuel my learning the most, it is those which contribute to my ability to practice PKM on a consistent basis.
My Top 10 for 2026
It is always hard to narrow down my list to a top ten, though I know how important constraints can be for our creativity and focus. To that end, here are my top tools for learning for 2026, as well as how I link them to my PKM practice of seeking, sensing, and sharing.
Seek
The following tools support my process of seeking, defined by Harold Jarche as:
… finding things out and keeping up to date. Building a network of colleagues is helpful in this regard. It not only allows us to “pull” information, but also have it “pushed” to us by trusted sources. Good curators are valued members of knowledge networks.
Overcast
Overcast tends to be the very first thing that comes up in my mind when I consider my top tools for learning. It is a podcast player with a wonderful free plan, supported by non-invasive ads, for people who want to try it. But the low cost of the annual subscription is a no-brainer for me, given all that it contributes to my learning.
I listen to podcasts on a daily basis. It still is so incredible to me what is available across all of my learning interests. I have custom playlists set up for news, politics, productivity, business and economics, teaching, technology, and more recently for audiobooks.
Overcast not only lets you subscribe to podcasts that you want to listen to and keeps track of ones that you've listened to or want to listen to in the future, but it also lets you upload audio files, and I find it helpful to have my audiobooks be available to me in the interface that I'm already so familiar with using, and it is such a well-thought-out interface from the developer Marco Arment.
Libby
As it relates to my learning through audiobooks and digital books, I can't say enough good things about Libby. Libby works with the two local library cards I have: my adored Mission Viejo Library card, and a second one I acquired this past year from the Orange County Public Library system.
And through Libby, I'm able to put e-books on hold and audiobooks on hold that I want to listen to, and it allows me to read those books in the Kindle app, and then I can listen to the audiobooks via their app as well. The nice thing about using Libby, which again then ports e-books over to Kindle, is that my highlights are still able to be saved in Readwise, and that way all the highlights that I create across all of my digital reading can be synced up and made available regardless of whether I purchased an e-book or checked it out from my library. I still think this is so remarkable. If it has been a while since you have checked out what's available through your public library, I highly suggest that you give it a go, especially in terms of what digital resources they may make available.
Unread
Unread has been my preferred RSS reading experience for a growing number of years. I use it primarily on my iPad, although any time I want to pull up the RSS feeds that I subscribe to on my iPhone, it works seamlessly there as well. What makes Unread unique to me from all of the other readers that I have tried in the past is that you can operate it with just one thumb doing your swiping.
I can go in and out of stories that I want to read more of as I am skimming through headlines and finding things I want to check out, and I'm able to therefore have such a seamless reading experience. Unread works with Inoreader, which I'll mention later on in the share section.
Sense
I often think of the sense-making part of my PKM as the wrestling with ideas and magnifying the power of learning out loud, despite often not feeling like I have any clue what I am doing. As Harold Jarche describes, when we are sensing:
…we personalize information and use it. Sensing includes reflection and putting into practice what we have learned. Often it requires experimentation, as we learn best by doing.
Obsidian
In this past year, I have switched to a new note-taking system. A long time ago, I used to use Evernote, but they started charging the most ridiculous prices, which eventually pushed me to move off of it. The application was also incredibly bloated. I then moved to a few others and finally made the move to Obsidian.
There's so much that I could say about it, but this is supposed to just be a top ten short look at them, but it is incredible what is possible through Obsidian. What I like about it is it's relatively easy to get started just to take notes, but it is incredibly expansive as you continue to learn more about it.
I have all of my notes for things like this very blog post that I'm writing to you now, along with my notes for classes that I teach or am preparing to teach, to notes for conferences that I attend, or workshops or keynotes that I offer. It's an amazing note-taking tool, and the most beautiful part about it is if I ever change my mind about that, every single note that I've taken in Obsidian doesn't live exclusively in Obsidian.
It is simply a plain text note sitting on my computer. So I never have to worry about being locked in to anything. By the way, if you're wondering how images show up in my notes if it's plain text, well, I have a single folder for all of the images that can easily then be embedded or otherwise pointed to from within a given note. I also like the ways that it links to other notes in some pretty incredible ways. I have notes for people who have come on the podcast, and then I can link to the episode notes for the time they came on the show, or over to the notes that I took on their book, or over to a quote that they shared that is now on my quotes list.
Raindrop
Raindrop is another tool that has long been on my top ten lists. It is a digital bookmarking tool. I have over 35,000 digital bookmarks that have all been placed into various collections, which you can think of as folders, and have been extensively tagged.
So when I'm reading an article or listening to a podcast, I can very easily add that bookmark to my Raindrop, place it in a collection, and add tags to it to make it that much easier to surface in the future. I'm still surprised more people don't use digital bookmarks for all the ways in which they can help us make sense of all the things that are coming at us that might be particularly relevant to us in our future learning and sense-making.
Zotero
Zotero is a reference manager and has been my go-to for academic references for a long while. I can be viewing a scholarly journal article, for example, and click on the Zotero button in my toolbar, and it automatically then adds all of the metadata for that source into my Zotero library.
And then later on, when I want to write about the sources that I have gathered, it has an add-in inside of Microsoft Word, which I still use for my scholarly writing, and I can easily cite the sources, search for them, create a bibliography off of all of the things that I've cited in a particular piece.
It makes that all seamless. I also like the way that Zotero easily lets me create collections for groups of people or join other people who are doing the same.
It is a wonderful tool, and I'm going to be teaching in our master's program in organizational psychology this fall, and am looking forward to introducing the students to Zotero from the very beginning of their experience and easing the road for them when it comes to doing scholarly writing.
Many of them will not have used a references manager before, and I'm excited to help them be proactive in making their own seeking, sensing, and sharing of their learning in the program that much easier through the use of Zotero.
Zoom
Zoom has been on my list most years for a long while now. The reason I especially didn't want to leave it off this year, though, is that I had a wonderful opportunity to learn from Said Saddouk, The Facilitainer, as part of his Virtual Facilitation Masterclass.
And while he offered the program through Zoom, he easily could have offered it through other online meeting platforms (as in the learning is applicable across a broad scope of tools). Said taught us hands-on how to be more effective in our facilitation, overall, including teaching us how to use OBS (an open-source tool that had previously been challenging for me to use effectively, before meeting Said).
If you facilitate often (online, or on campus), I highly suggest having a tool that allows you to set and modify agendas/class plans. I've been using SessionLab* for a couple of years now and highly recommend it. I set up all my courses within SessionLab, which then helps me stay organized and make shifts when things change. I pay for SessionLab, but if you use that link to sign up, you can help to defray some of those costs via the affiliate link.
Share
When we commit to sharing, we can extend our learning in unpredictable ways and sustain and extend relationships that can continue to enhance our growth. As Harold Jarche explains about this part of PKM, sharing involves:
…exchanging resources, ideas, and experiences with our networks as well as collaborating with our colleagues.
WordPress
WordPress continues to be what drives the Teaching in Higher Ed website, and I blogged a lot more this past year than I had in a long time. I participated in Harold Jarche's Personal Knowledge Mastery workshop and challenged myself to blog all the way through it.
I am happy to report that this went well and that I have deepened my learning because of my commitment to do that. I'm currently undertaking a redesign of the Teaching in Higher Ed website with my friend and web developer, and I'm excited that WordPress will still be the foundation for what drives so much of my ability to share, whether it be through the podcast feed, which runs through WordPress, as well as my blogging and other efforts.
Kit
New to the list this year, although not new to me, is Kit*, which is the email platform that allows me to stay in contact with the Teaching in Higher Ed community through the field journal.
The Field Journal allows me to share what I read, listened to, noted, and wondered about the prior week, and then get replies on what I wondered back from the community. And the Kit platform just makes this all seamless and gives an opportunity for people to see past posts, for if they join, they can always go back and look at some of the older posts, and it's just a great platform that I'm happy to have as part of my ways that I'm able to share.
Inoreader
And then finally, I mentioned Inoreader earlier. This is still my key RSS aggregator, and it is one of those things that is easy to get started with, but there's so much that you can do with it. Your creativity is kind of the limit here.
The Final Vote
I started this post, mentioning how motivated I can get while sustaining a streak. As I finalized my list and went over to the page for the 2026 voting, I noted a new word has been added to this page that wasn't there in prior years. That word is final. What a round number to wrap up with…
Looks like Jane is running her 20th annual and final survey in 2026. I saw on her LinkedIn page that she isn't consulting any longer and has mentioned being semi-retired. To get a sense of the depth and breadth of her work, see this profile in knowledge about Jane Hart by Stan Garfield on LinkedIn. What a resource she has provided to those of us in teaching and learning professions for decades now. I am glad that I had already determined that I wouldn't let this year's opportunity to vote pass me by and look forward to coming across others' posts with their top tools, not to mention the results of the final count.
* The Kit and SessionLab links above are affiliate links. Dave and I pay for both Kit and SessionLab, but if you use my link to sign up, you can help to defray our costs a bit.
