2019 EmergingEdTech Year in Review: Your Faves & My Faves

Before we Head Off Into a New Decade, Let's Take a Moment to Reflect on Another Year of Learning, Sharing, and Connecting

Well, another year draws to a close as we are about to embark on an exciting new decade! I can hardly believe it is going to be 2020. For as long as I can remember, that has seemed like the far flung future, yet here we are.

Being a blogger, I am obviously prone to reflection, a fundamental aspect of blogging. As the creator of the EmergingEdTech brand and the overseer of this website, it is a good practice to examine content trends and popularity from time to time. This can also be fun for readers. In 2019, EmergingEdTech averaged around 45,000 unique visitors per month (a sharp drop from 60K/mo in 2018, but it has been harder than ever to find the time to write and also keep up my other responsibilities).

Let's take a quick look back at what's been happening with popular site content over this last year. First, we'll start with the entirety of site content, then we'll focus on top content that was published in 2019. Lastly, I'll reflect on my own personal favorite pieces that I wrote over the year.

Top Ten Articles Viewed in 2019

Every few months I review these and make updates to the “Popular Posts” section in the right hand side bar, but over the last few years, many of these have become consistent favorites.

1. Top 11 Trusted (And Free) Search Engines For Scientific and Academic Research. This 2013 guest post from Katie Alice has been the most popular piece on the site a long time now. It bought in over 58,000 page views in 2019. I never would have expected this to become an anchor piece, but there it is.
2. 8 Examples of Transforming Lessons Through the SAMR Cycle. I put a lot of effort into developing examples to help to illustrate this interesting and practical approach to integration technology into lessons, developed by Ruben Puentedura. People seem to appreciate it (45K views this year).
3. Top 10 Ways to Increase Your Students Interest in a Subject. Educators are clearly looking to for help in this area, as this 2016 guest post from Luisa Brenton enjoyed nearly 34,000 views in 2019.
4. 20 Fun Free Tools for Interactive Classroom Collaboration. While this has been a winner since 2014 (with just under 33.7K views this year), it is aging out a bit. I'd love to direct people to this article as well, which is more conceptual but also offers many good tools and resources: 10 of the Most Engaging Uses of Instructional Technology (with Dozens of Resources and Tools).
5. Rounding out the top 5 with just under 30K views is, 5 Empowering and Inspiring Videos for Students, Teachers from Soul Pancake, a piece I put together back in 2015 to share some of the fun and inspiring content from the great folks at “Soul Pancake”. I wonder what Kid President is up to today?
   

   The next 5 top posts viewed in 2019 were:

6. 8 Engaging Ways to use Technology in the Classroom to Create Lessons That Aren't Boring
7. 10 Pretty Awesome Things You Can do With PowerPoint
8. Two Favorite Sources for Free to Use, No Attribution Required Images
9. 6 Vital Social Skills to Teach to Pre-School Children
10. Mayer's 12 Principles of Multimedia Learning are a Powerful Design Resource

Top Ten Articles Published in 2019

Of pieces published in 2019, these were the top 5 for viewership.

1. Five Predictions for the Future of Education
2. The Importance of Parental Involvement for Student Success
3. 5 Innovative Ways To Create A Healthy/Positive Classroom Culture
4. How Will IoT Change the Education Sphere?
5. The Best Resources, Sites, and Apps for Your Student Based on Their Learning Style

My Faves from 2019

I have been spread pretty thin these last few years with my roles as CIO and acting CISO at The College of Westchester, teaching at the college, writing for and maintaining this site, writing for University Business, working with the Flipped Learning Network, and making time for life, family, music, etc. Fortunately, I am able to keep publishing a steady stream if quality content by offering the opportunity for good guest writers who understand the edtech niche to share their content. Of course, I do still manage to make time to write articles that I am passionate about, and conduct the occasional interview with educators that I admire. Here are my favorites from 2019. I hope you'll click over and check some of them out if you haven't already.

• Prepare Your Students to Recognize Disinformation With the Bad News Game
• Social Media is Increasing Anxiety, Depression, Especially in Teen Girls. We Need to Talk About it.
• Exploring “Tech With Heart” With Stacey Roshan
• A Closer Look at the Science of Learning, “What Matters and What Doesn't for Teachers”
• The Best Uses of EdTech: Giving Every Student a Voice
• The Best Uses of EdTech: Providing Students CHOICE
• Teachers who Keep the Focus on Students can Inspire Success and Change the World
• 10 Technologies Higher Education Should Get Ahead of (or Fall Behind)
• Intelligent Tutoring Systems (a Decades-old Application of AI in Education)

Thanks so much to all my loyal readers, occasional readers, and newbies for continuing to make this site a fun and caring endeavor. I look forward to continuing to learn, share, and connect in 2020 and beyond!