300

This is my 300th post!

I started my blog in October 2010 with a post detailing my resolutions for the new academic year, my final one working at International Brno. It was 128 words (those were the days, I hear you cry!) and could be boiled down to this:

to use more technology in my classroom

The interim 298 posts have been a voyage in professional discovery. Coupled with the many blogs that I read, the conversations that I have on social media, and the conferences I’ve been lucky enough to go to, as well as the professional support I’ve had from all of the great IH schools I’ve worked at and my Delta, my blog and the ensuing comments have encouraged me to reflect on what I do in the classroom and really think about why I do it.

Going back to my original post, I now use a lot more technology in the classroom, but I’m also much more aware of when it’s not appropriate. I’ve learnt how and when to apply it, and I’m constantly experimenting with technology, among many other things. This is just one example of how joining the online teaching community has shaped my teaching.

In addition to what happens in the classroom, my writing style has developed hugely thanks to my blog, and I’ve branched out from being purely professional-focussed into sharing other aspects of my life as a teacher, including some of the bad bits, and some of the things I am witness to thanks to living in other countries and being from the UK. I’ve also learnt a lot about putting together posts, the most important of which is to always include an image – it makes it much easier to share it, and a bit more interesting to look at. It breaks up the text a bit too!

This is where my readers have come from since February 25, 2012. Thank you!

When people come up to me and say they’ve read my blog, there’s always a little voice in my head saying ‘Wow, how did that happen? How did I get to this?’ When I first started writing it, I wondered what I could add to all the great blogs I’d already been reading for a few months and I thought ‘No-one will ever read mine’. I decided to write for myself, and looking back over the blog is a great record of my professional development. I still write what I want to write, when I want to, without worrying about any kind of schedule, but now I know that someone somewhere will hopefully find each post useful, and I love the discussion/comments/other posts that come out of what I write. They make me think and inspire me to keep writing.

Last week, largely thanks to the TeachingEnglish British Council facebook page, which I cannot recommend highly enough, I reached over 300,000 views on my blog. This happened at the same time as my highest single day’s views (11,011) from this guest post by Tereza Eliasova on praise and feedback, which also meant that in May so far (it’s the 6th as I write this) I already have more views than I have had in any other month in the nearly four years I’ve been writing my blog. I find this phenomonal, and slightly scary!

That first post still only has 20 views, and about a quarter of my posts have less than 100 views. At the other end of the scale, these are the all time top five posts:

1. Useful FCE websites – 28,292 views
2. I am *super* impressed! (guest post) – 13,415 views
3. How I’m learning Russian – 8,395 views
4. Key Word Transformations with Modals of Speculation/Deduction – 7,503 views
5. Online resources for Business English teaching – 7,053 views

The second/third ones were written this week, and those views came almost exclusively from TeachingEnglish British Council on facebook. The first post is almost always the one that gets the highest number of views in any given week. I wonder how much that will change over the next 100 posts? 🙂