e-Learning Stuff: Top Ten Blog Posts 2017

This year I have written 21 blog posts, in 2016 it was 43 blog posts, in 2015 I wrote 24 blog posts. In 2014 I wrote 11 and in 2013 I wrote 64 blog posts and over a hundred in 2012. In 2011 I thought 150 was a quiet year!

The tenth most popular blog post in 2017 was written for the 2015 ALT Winter Conference, my blog post on time and priorities, I don’t have a dog #altc This was a discussion piece and looks at the over used excuse for not doing something, which is not having the time to do it. The real reason though, more often then not, is that the person concerned does not see it as a priority.

In ninth place is a post from 2016, which was Mapping the learning and teaching. Mapping is an useful exercise to think about practice and though any such map may not be accurate or complete, it does allow you to consider and think about actions and training required to change behaviours or how spaces and tools are used. I took the concepts used in mapping visitor and residents behaviour and looked at how it could be used for teaching and learning. This post has been used for workshops in some universities and colleges.

Dropping down to number eight was Comic Life – iPad App of the Week Though I have been using Comic Life on the Mac for a few years now I realised I hadn’t written much about the iPad app that I had bought back when the iPad was released. It’s a great app for creating comics and works really well with the touch interface and iPad camera.

Back in June I wrote up the presentation I was going to deliver in Manchester for the CILIP Conference in July, and this post, The Intelligent Library #CILIPConf17 was in at number seven. What is the future of the library? This session at the CILIP Conference will explore the potential technologies and the possibilities that can arise from the developments in artificial intelligence and the internet of things. Can we build an intelligent library? Do we want to?

Back in 2015 I asked I can do that… What does “embrace technology” mean? in relation to the Area Review process and this post was the sixth most popular post in 2017.

Clmbing back two places to fifth was 100 ways to use a VLE – #89 Embedding a Comic Strip. This was a post from July 2011, that looked at the different comic tools out there on the web, which can be used to create comic strips that can then be embedded into the VLE. It included information on the many free online services such as Strip Creator and Toonlet out there. It is quite a long post and goes into some detail about the tools you can use and how comics can be used within the VLE.

Dropping two places to fourth, is Can I legally download a movie trailer? One of the many copyright articles that I posted some years back, this one was in 2008, I am still a little behind in much of what is happening within copyright and education, one of things I do need to update myself on, as things have changed.

In third place is a post from 2017, Show me the evidence… This post was inspired by a discussion on the ALT Members mailing list, in which one line asked:

…in particular to share these with academics when they ask for the evidence to show technology can make a difference.

In the post I questioned the motivations about staff when asking the question and if this was the actual problem why staff weren’t engaging with learning technologies. I am sure it is for some, but from my personal experience, often it isn’t!

Climbing back two places back to second, from 2013, was Frame Magic – iPhone App of the Week, still don’t know why this one is so popular!

Once again, for the fifth year running, the number one post for 2016 was the The iPad Pedagogy Wheel. I re-posted the iPad Pedagogy Wheel as I was getting asked a fair bit, “how can I use this nice shiny iPad that you have given me to support teaching and learning?”.

It’s a really simple nice graphic that explores the different apps available and where they fit within Bloom’s Taxonomy. What I like about it is that you can start where you like, if you have an iPad app you like you can see how it fits into the pedagogy. Or you can work out which iPads apps fit into a pedagogical problem.

So there we have it, the top ten posts of2017, of which just two were from 2017!

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