Posts Tagged blogging
2010 in review
Posted by kmcg2375 in online tools, reflections, technology on January 19, 2011
I wonder if the popularity of my top five reflects audience interest in curriculum issues, or the hot-ness of topics such as ‘HSC’ and ‘multimodal’ (due to its appearance in the English National Curriculum)?
Either way, thanks for reading in 2010 
The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:
The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.
Crunchy numbers
A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 12,000 times in 2010. That’s about 29 full 747s.
In 2010, there were 71 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 181 posts. There were 41 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 16mb. That’s about 3 pictures per month.
The busiest day of the year was January 24th with 189 views. The most popular post that day was Choice based on what now?.
Where did they come from?
The top referring sites in 2010 were twitter.com, facebook.com, google.com.au, eduleader.org, and Google Reader.
Some visitors came searching, mostly for kelli mcgraw, julia gillard, multimodal text definition, multimodal, and multimodal texts definition.
Attractions in 2010
These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.
Choice based on what now? January 2010
37 comments
Defining ‘multimodal’ May 2010
13 comments
The Australian Curriculum for English March 2010
10 comments
HSC English: Standard or Advanced? March 2010
11 comments
5 reasons why HSC and ATAR scores make the angels cry December 2009
12 comments
Getting students involved in blogging
Posted by kmcg2375 in school, technology on November 29, 2008
Barriers to getting involved:
- Access issues – power in rural and remote areas
- Equity issues – not all students are digitally literate
- Equipment access – access to computer labs, laptops, broadband
- Home access – students with no computers or internet access at home
- Behaviour management – ICT TOO EXCITING!
Please add any ideas you have for overcoming these barriers…
Online Pedagogy
Posted by kmcg2375 in conferences, online tools on November 28, 2008
In today’s conference workshop I will be exploring four important issues relating to learning and teaching strategies for using online tools:
- How the purpose of your site relates to its form
- The intended teacher-student dynamic online
- Students and internet safety
- Getting students involved and monitoring contributions
Please respond with comments to this post if you have any questions, information or anecdotes from your own teaching context.
(DET Interim Guidelines for using blogs and wikis)
(from the ETA Annual Conference @ UNSW )
STOP WORK
I’ve just come home from this morning’s stopwork meeting organised by the NSW Teachers Federation.
Read more about the Teachers Federation Staffing, Standards and Salaries campaign here.
The meeting finished half an hour ago, but I am resisting the urge to use the time to finish off some school work…not just because I think it is important for teachers to ‘stay true’ to the stopwork by, well, stopping work, but also because I am so burned out with school work right now that an imposed 2 hour break is a welcome relief.
Over the past couple of weeks my blog has been neglected, emails have gone unread, and I haven’t even been opening Twitter. No comment from me about Barack Obama’s historic win in the US election. No comment (still) about the proposed National Curriculum, and (perhaps worst) no reflection on my teaching or engagement in professional learning.
So, while filling up on petrol that had nearly run dry because I’ve had no time to fill the car, and after picking up some take away breakfast because I had run out of time and skipped mine earlier in the morning, I decided to use the rest of my stopwork time to write this post.
A little bit of a cheat of course, because as far as I’m concerned blogging = professional learning, which = work! But the school workload atm is so depressingly huge that I’m prepared to cheat on this…until reports are finished at the end of this week, I don’t know if I’ll get the chance to blog again…
Six Reasons People Aren’t Commenting on Your Blog
Posted by kmcg2375 in Uncategorized on August 10, 2008
Just browsing through the ‘Best of Bamboo’ on Michele Martin’s blog The Bamboo Project and learned a lot from her post titled Six Reasons People Aren’t Commenting on Your Blog. You can read more about this at Michele’s blog, but the six reasons in short are:
- You sound like a press release
- You sound like an informercial
- You sound like a know-it-all
- You haven’t shown them how
- You haven’t created the right atmosphere
- You just don’t seem that into it.
A great list, and one that really got me thinking. My last few posts have included some lengthy accounts of what I’m doing with my classes at school. I’ve specifically been blogging about the videogaming unit that I’m using with my Year 9 G&T class, in part because I know others who are interested in how the unit is working, but also because I am using this blog to store information about this unit as part of an G&T Action Research project I am part of at school. I’ve also started adding detailed info about how I am running an AOS on The Journey with Year 10. This is in part to reflect on my own teaching, but also I have lofty imaginations of teachers scouring the web for units of work and getting really happy when they find my blog with all of this great information!
I find that the problem with such posts is that they don’t explicitly invite discussion or reflection from readers. I think this is a result of reasons 3 and 4 – while I don’t exactly sound like a ‘know-it-all’, I haven’t problematised any of my work, merely recounted what I did; and while readers might technically know how to comment, they can’t see a clear invitation or need to add their thoughts.
What do other people do here? What makes a truly engaging blog post?
Nominated!
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