EmergingEdTech – The future looks bright!

End of year wrap up, and plans for 2010.

Well, this marks the end of my first year as a blogger. I did a little blogging in late '08, but in March of 2009 I established EmergingEdTech.com, and with the help of  these great “31 Days To Build a Better Blog“ lessons from Problogger.com, in April I started building a following.  Along the way I've learned soooo much, interacted with some great people, and had a lot of fun.

A main goal when I started this blog was to become increasingly informed about Education Technology, and to provide a resource for educators at the college where I work to learn along with me. I was also interesting in learning about blogging, and the many things that go into blogging successfully (the technology needed to create, maintain, and manage your own web site, how to market it, etc.). I quickly found myself hooked by the whole process – the feedback, the dialogue, the cool tech tools, and of course – the readers. None of this amounts to anything without readers like you 🙂.

Along the way, I also become familiar with the growing community of education technology blogs, social networks, forums, etc., and the many people who host and manage them. There's room for all of us out here in the Ed Tech “blogosphere”, especially since there are so many tools and technologies out there, and so many ways to use them. We're all learning from each other!

Other Accomplishments
I've enjoyed some pretty successful posts, and watched subscriber numbers and traffic grow streadily. The site is approaching 10,000 page views a month, we've had 800 visitors in a day, and I'm looking forward to hitting 1000 subscribers in 2010. The “Popular Posts” listed in the sidebar continually attract a good deal of traffic.

Over the course of the year, the blog was nominated for 2 awards (Top Resource Sharing Blog from Edublog Awards and Top 100 Language Technology blogs from Lexiophiles). Being nominated was certainly cool, and next year I look forward to turning a nomination into a win!

Another fun thing that came about largely because of this blog was being asked to host a Webinar with Campus Technology earlier this month. We had almost 100 attendess for our discussion about “Portal, LMS, & Alert Solutions: Best of Breed or Single Source”, which focused primarily on the Timecruiser application suite. The recorded webinar is available here (note that you have to register with the site in order to hear the Webinar recording).

2010 … and beyond!
As I look ahead to 2010, there is no shortage of technologies I'm interested in learning more about. I'll bet the same holds for you as well! In addition to continuing to blog about Internet tools for the classroom and other instructional technologies and applications, I also intend to publish my first e-book, and develop some online tutorials about some of these great technologies.

As for specific topics, in January I'll be learning and blogging about lecture capture technologies tools and then probably venturing into some of the many free and low cost tools available for the creation of presentation materials. I will also follow up on our research into Interactive White Boards with additional things we've learned as we continued to try various tools and applications related to the use of IWBs.

The topics I've just mentioned all sort of overlap and tie in to each other, and are of particular interest to me lately, but there are so many other technologies out there and ways to use them in the educational setting. I'd love to learn more about you, and what you want to learn more about. Toward that end I've put together this very brief survey. It's got just 5 questions (plus the standard “Is there anything else you want to add?” question at the end). I'd be so appreciative if you could give a couple clicks and let me know what your professional role is (teacher, admin, etc.), what grade levels you work with, what you like about EmergingEdTech, and what you'd like to see more of. Thanks so much!

In closing, I hope everyone is having a chance to enjoy a little end of year respite, and some holiday cheer. Thanks again for your readership and participation this year, and let's all be thankful for the wonderful new year to come.