How we learn and share what we learn can be organized into several categories. The following are the categories of learning that we are going to learn about and use tools to support them.

• Adaptation: We learn by reading, hearing, touching, writing, drawing, talking, etc. Some of us, for example, learn better by hearing while others by reading. Thus we will look at tools that can change how information is presented to us. Using a tool to have the words on a page read to you is an adaptation .
• Citizenship: This category isn't so much about finding tools, it is about how we work with others to learn. Learning from our classmates, teachers, parents, etc. involves following rules while also developing behaviors that help us be respectful listeners and supportive of one another.
• Creation: Learning is all about ideas, making connections and finding ways to create.
• Communication & Presentations: We use e-mail, phones, blogs and social network tools to connect with others and to voice our ideas. There are a great many ways we present our ideas using rich images, video, mind maps, etc.
• Collaboration: Communicating to share ideas, work on projects and innovate draws upon and develops skills for connected learning and the workplace. Technology facilitates the process of developing, organizing and sharing those ideas. Collaboration also involves some very important social skills. :)
• Curation of Information: Personal Learning Systems are more effective when we have a place to store, organize, and share the information we consume and create.
• Documentation of Information & Note-taking: There are different techniques to take notes and many tools that support them. Citizenship kicks in as we responsibly and correctly cite our sources of information.
• Journaling: Journaling is definitely a big part of the learning that takes place in our schools. Just as with portfolios, teachers are moving more and more of the writing to the Web where they and their students have 24/7 access to write and share ideas. Blogs definitely stand out as one way to provide a place for students to journal on their own and in response to teacher prompts.
• Portfolios: Portfolios have been around a long time. The change over the past decade has been to move them to web-based systems for 24/7 access and ease in sharing multimedia artifacts.
• Project Planning: Planning for projects that involve creating a learning product engages students in using many tools in their Personal Learning System.
• Reference and General Information Gathering: Remember the day when we had a dictionary, thesaurus, calculator and maybe an encyclopedia within easy reach of our work space? Today we have online versions of each, along with a rich variety of apps on our devices.
• Task and Time Management: The paper planner and calendar do not provide all the services offered by a web-based event and task management calendar. We can now easily access our time management systems across our computing platforms and integrate appointments and tasks into our e-mail.
• Tutorials, Educational Media and Courses: Developing lifelong learners who know how to learn independently is one of our primary goals in education. Teachers speak of their Professional Learning Networks (PLN) that include fellow educators around the globe, blogs, podcasts, educator networks, etc. that we draw upon for professional and personal learning. Students can do the same by first finding the information resources and then the people via social networking who they can learn from and with.

Image Sources: Apps