21k12

My fifth year in blogging is now coming to an end.   My blog began with in the fall of 2008 over at blogspot, and then I migrated it here to wordpress in late January 2009.

Once a year– and only once a year, I like to share some reflections and statistics upon my year here at 21k12.

2012 sadly saw a small dip in the number of postings: down to 120 posts this year, compared to 150 last year, 165 the year prior.  My aim continues to be an average of 3 times weekly, 12-15 times monthly, and I say this because blogging is best practiced as a habit, as a regular discipline such as exercise, and when I fall off my routines and slow my pace, I feel a faltering and a fading that doesn’t serve me.  The longer I go between posts, the harder it is to get going on a new post.

But, I do allow myself vacations– and as I completed my third and final year as St. Gregory’s head of school last spring, I took almost two months off from the blog.  In my weeks working on the blog, I’m still maintaining the three (or even a tad more) weekly posts.

As for total page views, growth continued.   Last year I wrote that “my 70,000+ page views in 2011, compared to 29,200 in 2010 and about 16,000 in 2009, represents a second consecutive year of doubling my readership. ” I then said I had n0 expectation of doubling again in 2012, setting instead an ambition to climb from 70,000 to 100,000.

But I did double again, for the third year in a row, taking 2012 views to 142,000.

Let me be clear here: there is no possibility that 2013 will see a fourth “doubling” in views.   I’m setting instead a goal of 175,00, which may be itself ambitious.

In classic 20/80 fashion, it is only a very small number of posts and pages which generate the view rates in the five figures that support the high overall  totals.

One is my graduation speech page, launched in 2011, which, as I explained last year, I put up as a resource for principals and school-leaders looking for advice and sample speeches to give at graduation. Before posting this, I remembered vividly a few occasions when I was just days or hours away from a school graduation talk, and I jumped onto Google to find some samples for inspiration and format/templates, but rarely succeeded in finding useful examples.   So I thought I could be helpful by loading up a page that provides links to about a dozen of my past graduation remarks.   The graduation speech landing page generated almost 24,000 hits, every single one of them the result of a search engine search for “graduation speech by principal” or a closely related variant.,

The sample graduation talks which the landing page directs readers to generated another roughly 20,000 page views, the most popular of them being  Helping Others is the Real Victory, (3800), Struggle to Grow and Learn: Remarks to Middle School Students at Promotion (3400), and Map-making, not following: Learning, Leading, Innovating: (2700).

My most popular post here from 2012, at almost 15,000 views, was a post offering a roundup of favorite 21st century learning videos: Videos Suggested for Back to School Faculty Meetings and other educational audiences.   This was not only my most viewed 2012 post, but the Twitter count on this one astounded me, at almost 700 tweets, by far my “most tweeted” ever.

The 21st century videos post I pulled together in a couple of hours in August, sitting on my couch watching the Olympics.  After my summer travels, I was returning with vigor to my blog, and I remember thinking it was a good time to try to put up a popular post, one which would generate a little more traffic than the average– something less dense with text, something people would find useful and want to pass around.   It seemed to me too that it was the time of year when many principals and school-heads were planning their back to school faculty meetings, and it was a good time for an inspirational video to rally and motivate for 21st century learning.   So I intended and expected this particular post would be popular– but I didn’t expect it to surge as strongly as it did, bringing me my best-ever single day page view the day after I posted it, 1967.

Over at Connected Principals I did a similar thing in the beginning of August.  Knowing that many principals write a summer-time back to school letter for families, and knowing that the example of such a letter which I posted the summer prior had generated quite a bit of search engine traffic, I thought to myself maybe I can offer some suggestions for writing these letters– what tone to take, what to include, etc– in a post entitled  9 Suggestions for the Welcome Back to School letter from the Principal.  This one has now welcomed over 13,000 views, and holds the status currently for single most-viewed post for 2012 at Connected Principals by any of the contributors there.

Here then are the top ten most-viewed in 2012 posts (and composed in 2012).

1. Videos Suggested for Back to School Faculty Meetings and other educational audiences (14719)
2. “Best Ted Talk Ever:” Shawn Achor on Happiness and Productivity (4309)
3. Beating the Cheating: Five Ways to Combat the Plague  (3726)
4. Treating Others as Ends: Katniss Everdeen, Social Entrepreneurship, and the Ethical Imperative: (1560)
5. Khan Academy and flipping the classroom on 60 minutes: the good and the bad (816)
6. Play, Passion, Purpose, and Project Based Learning: Thoughts on Tony Wagner’s new book, Creating Innovators: (813)
7. Formative Assessment, Practical Skills, and PBL: What’s Next On the Horizon: Pat Bassett’s NAIS Presentation (791)
8. Networked Learning at the core of a new report on Innovating Pedagogy (702)
9. “Flip Your Classroom”: the new book from Bergmann and Sams (584)
10. Thoughts on Will Richardson’s fine 19 Bold Ideas for Change in Education.(572)

A few comments. (more…)

It is time for the annual year in review on the 21k12 blog.  Over the past year I have posted just over 150 times, which is down a tad from 165 posts in 2010, but is meeting my goal of averaging 3 posts a week and 12-15 a month.

In page views, I am happy to share that my 70,000+ page views in 2011, compared to 29,200 in 2010 and about 16,000 in 2009, represents a second consecutive year of doubling my readership.   It would seem unlikely that I will be able to see a third year of doubling, but it does prompt me to set a not entirely unreasonable goal of 100,000 page views in 2012!

2011 also saw my first ever 7,000+ month, June, and my first ever 10,000+ month, October.  Both records were entirely due to the success of my top two posts/pages of the year, a page about Graduation Speeches I posted in May (2700+ at present), and an October post about the New York Times article on Waldorf education and technology on Waldorf education (3300+ at present).

For each of these two cases, I executed a deliberate, and seemingly successful, strategy to attract visitors: two alternate, even opposite strategies.   For the first, Graduation Speeches, my strategy was entirely focused on drawing search engine referrals.   As May approached, I had a flash remembering all the many times I have confronted the need to prepare an upcoming graduation address as a school-principal, and my impulse at those times to seek inspiration from examples from other principals.   Accordingly, I googled “graduation speeches by school principals,” but found only very few useful search results.   So what occurred to me last spring, realizing I had a set of a dozen of my own past graduation speeches, was that I could provide this service for other principals, posting my talks and organizing them under one umbrella page, which I then seeded with a slew of searchable terms (see the post to see what I mean).  It seemed to work– not only did the umbrella page capture nearly 3000 views, but seven of the speeches linked to from that page each received more than 400 views.  (The most popular of the 12 graduation talks was Struggle to Grow and Learn: Remarks to Middle School Students at Promotion).  What I wish I knew was whether any of these many visitors found any value in what I shared, or even drew upon any of them for their talks– but I have no idea.

For the post about a NYT front page article on technology at a Waldorf school, I took an almost opposite strategy, seeking to be “first out of the gate”  in posting my reaction to the article that morning, and then using Twitter as best I could to “push it” to become viral.  After tweeting it out myself, I then spent part of the day watching Twitter as others tweeted out links to the article and tweeting replies that I had posted a reaction– and then seeing many of those tweeters tweet out my post to their followers.   That day I received 820 views of just that post (my previous one-day record for all views being about 500), and the next day, 709.  I realize “viral” is a highly relative concept, but in my little corner of the blogosphere, this represented by far my greatest “viral” success.

Now the list: Top Ten Posts from 2011 here at 21k12:

1. Deeply Disappointed: Responding to the New York Times article on Waldorf education and technology (3342)
2. Graduation Speeches (2740)
3. The Flipped Classroom Advances: Developments in Reverse Learning and Instruction (2216) (more…)

Increasingly, I am writing posts for other blog-sites, and I have an inconsistent practice: sometimes I repost them here to 21k12, and sometimes I do not.  When I don’t, I’ll try to make a habit of providing links here for folks who primarily read me via this 21k12blog.  (If you follow me on Twitter, you know I always tweet out the links to posts elsewhere).

Yesterday, my first post for edSocialMedia went up; edSocialMedia has a tag line: Exploring the Role of Social Media in Education, a topic about which I am both intensely curious and very enthusiastic.   I am pleased to have been welcomed there as a contributor.

The post is entitled: “Dilemmas & Tensions of Blogging: Learning from Montaigne.”  Check it out if you are interested.

In the past ten days I have also posted two pieces to Connected Principals which I did not double-post here:

• Salman Khan, Transformer— this post has generated far more discussion and debate in the comment boxes than nearly any other post I have written to date.

• 8 Rules for Managers from Google: “Technical Expertise” is dead-last. This post reflects upon the applicability of Google’s rule for managers, as explained in the New York Times last Sunday, to educational leadership.

Happy reading, and, as always, I welcome and appreciate your comments.

2010 has been a great year blogging for me; this is my third year blogging, and each year gets better.   Blogging is a craft that could be called asymptotatic, as Dan Pink describes in Drive; there is no ceiling to bump into, no limit, and provides a stimulating challenge for the ongoing pursuit of mastery. Pink: “You can approach it.  You can home in on it.  You can get really, really close to it.  But you can never touch it…. Mastery attracts precisely because mastery eludes.”

In 2010 I posted over 150 times here at 21k12; over at Connected Principals, which was launched in August by the terrific blogger George Couros, I posted over twenty times (in many cases, those posts were re-posted from here at 21k12).

Readers of my blog don’t have the same perspective about the “success” or relative significance of posts that I do, because they don’t see the stats the way I do about visits.  But once a year it seems wise to share the dozen or so posts which seemed to strike a chord with readers.

What is nice to me about this list is that it corresponds very closely to my own view of my favorite posts, the ones of which I am proudest.  Below this list I add another half dozen that I wish had received as much attention as this list.

1.  Reverse Instruction: Dan Pink and Karl’s “Fisch Flip”.  190 views here, 2001 views at CP.   Over 2000 views in a period of less than two months is certainly a personal record for my blogging.  One of my favorite aspects of this successful post is that its content was entirely the result of my learning as a blogger.  I had previously posted about Khan Academy, and spoke about the concept of inverting instruction there, but then John Sowash commented on that post about reverse instruction, and this new post was born from that dialogue on Connected Principals.  I should also thank here the attention given to this post by Stephen Valentine in the November Klingbrief and Shelly Wright who blogged about it here.

2.  Engaging, not Distracting, the Digital Generation: Responding to the Times’ Wired piece.  327 here, 890 at CP.     Like many others in my corner of the blogosphere, I was inflamed by the Times piece, and spent Thanksgiving week furiously thinking how to respond, and then poured my passionate indignation into this post.  I am so happy it struck a chord for others too; it was my most “retweeted” post, 121 times at CP. (more…)