e-Learning Stuff: Top Ten Blog Posts 2021

laptop and headphones
Image by Regina Störk from Pixabay

This year I have written 113 blog posts. In 2020 I had written 94 blog posts. In 2019 I had written 52 blog posts which was up from 2018 when I only wrote 17 blog posts.

I decided when I got my new role in March 2019 that I would publish a weekly blog post about my week. I did this all across 2021 as well which added to the number of posts. I did once get asked if these week notes were popular, not really, but they are much more for me than for others.

Well 2021 like 2020 was an unexpected and interesting year, this did have an impact on what blog posts were popular and those that people read. Due to the impact of the pandemic on higher education this influenced what I was writing about in 2021.  However many of the posts in the top ten are from the archive.

So the blog post at number ten in the top ten is an old post on Steering a supertanker… It’s pretty easy to be honest.

The ninth place was Ten ways to use QR Codes which was not a post about ten ways to use QR codes.

At number eight was a discussion piece on the The tyranny of the timetable.

Another old post was at number seven, 100 ways to use a VLE – #89 Embedding a Comic Strip

Asking Can I legally download a movie trailer? was the sixth most viewed post on the blog. One of the many copyright articles that I posted some years back, this one was in 2008. Things have changed since then, one of which is better connectivity which would allow you to stream content direct into a classroom, as for the legal issues well that’s something I am a little behind on the times though in that space.

The post at number five was from a series about translation of in-person to online delivery, Lost in translation: the lecture. Before having 4-5 hours in a lecture theatre or a classroom was certainly possible and done by many institutions. However merely translating that into 4 hours of Zoom video presentations and discussions is exhausting for those taking part, but also we need to remember that in this time there are huge number of other negative factors impacting on people’s wellbeing, energy and motivation. This post explored the options and possibilities that could be undertaken instead of merely translating a one hour lecture into a one hour Zoom presentation.

Fourth most popular post was a now obselete guide to Full Resolution Video on the PSP. Still surprised by how popular Full Resolution Video on the PSP was even though I am pretty sure that no one is still using PSPs.

The post at number three was from 2015, I can do that… What does “embrace technology” mean? was from the FE Area Reviews.

Second most viewed post was “million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten”

The most popular post in 2021 is one of the all time popular posts, The iPad Pedagogy Wheel. Published in 2013, this was number one for many years, number two in 2019  and number three in 2020. 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 of 2021.

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