This year I have written 92 posts to the blog. There were 113 blog posts in 2021. 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 2022 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.
So the blog post at number ten in the top ten is an old post from my series on how to use a VLE, 100 ways to use a VLE – #89 Embedding a Comic Strip. This one is still popular and is about embedding comic trips from online services into the VLE.
The ninth most popular post was from a more recent series of mine, lost in translation, and focussed on the lecture, it was called 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. Simply translating what we do in our physical buildings into an online remote version, is relatively simple, however it may not be effective. Thinking about what you want that learning experience to achieve and what you want the students to learn, means you can do different things.
At number eight was some thinking I had been doing on timetables, the post was titled: The tyranny of the timetable. When you start down the road, moving from a static timetable to a smart timetable, and then onto an intelligent timetable, you start to realise that the timetable is actually a small part of the work involved. There is a whole lot of data needed to enable the timetable to make smart or intelligent decisions.
A really old post from 2008 was the seventh most popular post. It was about Full Resolution Video on the PSP. Do people still use the PSP?
Climbing to sixth place was a post on change, Steering a supertanker… It’s pretty easy to be honest.
One of my favourite quotes from Terry Pratchett is that “million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten”. When something awful happens, or freakish, we hear news reporters say “it was a million-to-one chance that this would happen”. At number five was a post on freakish occurrences, “million-to-one chances happen nine times out of ten”
The fourth most popular post was from 2008, up two places from last year, Can I legally download a movie trailer? One of the many copyright articles that I posted some years back. 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.
Moving from place to third was Ten ways to use QR Codes which was not a post about ten ways to use QR codes.
The second 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, including last yea,r 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.
The post at number one was from 2015, I can do that… What does “embrace technology” mean? was from the FE Area Reviews.
So there we have it, the top ten posts of 2022.