Back in 2022, I posted about the set of tools I use in my day-to-day work in learning technology. It’s been a few years and I though it would be good to record my toolbox for late 2025 / early 2026 and see what’s stayed the same and what’s changed.
Firefox, Safari and … Orion
Firefox remains my workhorse web browser at the moment. I’ve been degooglifying over the last few years and being able to avoid Chromium based browsers has been one of my goals — it’s not 100% an option, so I do use Chrome for specific things (mostly enterprise training…). Safari is my “alternate view” browser, which I still primarily use for logging in with my administrative accounts or other alternates for different views.
I added Orion primarily for my reading browser. It’s developed by Kagi — the pay-for-search service, which I still haven’t actually used much yet — and is designed with privacy as a high priority, with automatic blocking of ads and tracking. It’s an interesting addition to the tool box, but at the moment it’s not going to displace the main Firefox Safari combo.
Outlook and Teams
Outlook and Teams are the two main tools I have open when I’m working. Teams especially is my main link to my team, as we’re not all in the office on any specific day. Teams is also becoming a point of contact for people from outside my team to stay in touch.
One change I’ve started to implement is actually to close Outlook and Teams while I do other work. I’m learning more about my brain, and one thing I’ve learned is that if a message comes in I will stop whatever I’m doing and look at it. So when I need a block of focus time I’m starting to use focus modes on my devices or just out and out closing my messaging tools.
One other thing about Outlook and Teams, when I work from home, I usually use my own hardware and use WebOutlook and WebTeams (in Firefox) rather than the dedicated apps. Overall I have to say that they are much worse than their dedicated application counterparts.
Obsidian
One of the biggest change to my work is how I take notes. I’ve tried a lot of things with pen and paper notes, and while I think those still matter, for sheer volume of recording and organization and searchability I had to move to a more powerful system.
Obsidian is great and does almost everything I want, at least when powered up with it’s suite of core and community plug-ins. Recording notes in markdown is clean an efficient and linking to connect related things is really helpful. I’m also using Obsidian’s Vault feature, so when I switch devices my notes are pretty much there and ready.
I still do use pen and paper notes when it’s the polite thing to do, or when I need the creativity bump of using physical media. One important part of that is to make sure I schedule time to transcribe those notes back into Obsidian.
Zoom
Zoom remains the primary video conferencing tool on the faculty member side of the University. Teams is much more common for support staff. As we continue to support Zoom for teaching and learning, we continue to use it. I also find that it’s a lighter weight tool and better quality than Teams in most video conferencing scenarios.
One of the areas I’m thinking about still is Zoom’s AI features. One thing I’m finding with changes in my role and having to be a more active participant in meetings is that it’s hard to take notes, as much easier as Obsidian makes it. Zoom is developing better tools for taking notes and transcripts (hit or miss still, but reasonable) and I think building that into more meeting workflows will help me keep things up to date. Zoom recently pitched their ability to transcribe an in person meeting to me and it made me think.
Zotero
I’m still using Zotero to keep track of my reading and academic work. It’s a great tool to build your data base of papers, and it has good integration with Obsidian. One of my goals for the year is to refine how I use those two together so my notes are better organized and I can keep my thoughts together better.
Microsoft Office (or 365 or copilot or something)
Office — and I’m insisting on calling it office for now — is still the thing I use the most for the work I’m doing. Being able to share documents through OneDrive is really helpful and overall it does what I need to put things into reasonable document.
I will say in my personal life, my degooglification has lead me back to LibreOffice of all things and that has been a surprisingly pleasant switch of tools.
Miro
I was primarily using Miro for my task tracking, but I’ve move that into Obsidian (where I’m tracking what I’ve done and also what I need to do). Still Miro is my preferred whiteboard tool and my preferred too for drawing diagrams.
And onward
I think that covers most of what I’m using right now. I have some plans for different kinds of projects for 2026, so it will — hopefully — be interesting to revisit this again next year.
Comments
One response to “My 2025 Learning Technology Toolbox”
FWIW, I have a Claude project called “Notebook Transcriber” – it does a decent-ish job, if I don’t write too sloppily (which, often…). I set it up with instructions:
You will interpret photos and screenshots of handwritten notes, converting them as effectively as possible into Markdown-compatible format compatible with Obsidian. Look for titles at the tops of pages, dates at top left or right corners. There may be hand sketched diagrams and I’d like you to try converting them into Obsidan Excalidraw markdown format if possible.
Do not summarize the notes. Do not generate new content. Only transcribe the notes to Markdown text to the best of your abilities.
My handwriting and printing is often quite horrible. You’ll need to do your best to faithfully transcribe letters and numbers – especially numbers – to make sure the text is accurate.
Markdown formatting to use include:
Headings (#, ##, ###)
bold, italic
lists (bullet and numbered)
hyperlinks
tables
mermaid diagrams
and anything else you think might be appropriate.
If you see a square at the beginning of a line, it’s a todo item. Replace the square with Obsidian Tasks markdown format “- [ ]”