This is my 300th post.

A little under 5 years ago, on the 8th of May 2011, I took my first faltering step into the world of blogging with my response to the first goal in the 30 Goals Challenge for teachers – Be a beam. It has been viewed by a staggering 44 people! 😉 Probably mostly the kindly souls I had discovered on Twitter not long before I started blogging (from where the idea came from, for me) taking pity on me haha! Opening it and reading it this morning wasn’t as cringeworthy as I had expected, in fact 5 years down the line, those beliefs remain intact, as do the ones I expressed in What do you believe about learning? (aka Goal no. 3) which has turned out to be my least-read post with a whole 15 views. I actually quite fancy writing another response to the ‘What do you believe about learning?‘ goal, to include everything I’ve learnt about learning since that time. (Yet another idea to join the backlog of 40 drafts including this one…)

At the other end of the spectrum, my most-viewed post, with 13,287 views, is My top ten resources for teaching IELTS – not the one I would have said if asked to guess! I would have guessed one that weighs in with around half that many, Thirty things to enhance your teaching, as that was the post that won me the British Council blog of the month award for the first time, in 2013 and it’s also older than the IELTS one, so has had longer to accrue views. Then again, the IELTS one is easier to stumble across when hunting for IELTS resources and I suppose there are enough teachers out there who are interested in finding IELTS resources for their classes!  

Here are my top 10:

There are more than ten links listed because some of them are pages…

Pages

My website pages (i.e. all the tabs apart from what are now “About Lizzie” and “Reflections” which is the actual blog element) only came into being mostly between April and June 2013, with a couple more added in early 2014. They were the result of learning a bit more about WordPress as a site builder in my Multimedia and Independent Learning module at Leeds Met/Beckett, which led to overhauling my little blog site into something more closely resembling what it is today. The most-viewed page other than the home page/landing page is my Materials page where I have collected examples of materials I have made, for other teachers to use. It’s definitely due an update! Again, not what I would have guessed! I would have guessed my M.A. ELT/Delta page, where all my Delta and M.A.-related posts are gathered and what my blog seems to be most strongly associated with! My favourite page, though, is my Learner Autonomy page, which is also well overdue an update! This is because it brings together all my posts relating to my learner autonomy projects, learner autonomy-related materials and to write-ups of learner autonomy-themed talks that I have delivered and attended.

One statistic that I stumbled across today was that of numbers of posts in each of my categories. It’s funny I hadn’t really noticed it before, given the numbers are displayed on my site alongside each category – I just hadn’t paid them much attention…  However, it’s the Conferences category that grabbed my attention this morning: 71 posts! Most recently added to last Saturday, at the Materials Writing SIG conference down in London. That means 71 conference sessions either attended or delivered (both are included in the same category). How lucky I am! 🙂

People

Last but not least, indeed most important I would say… what about the people? By people, I mean readers. You. There are currently 869 of you who receive an email every time I publish something (poor things… :-p ). Between you, you have made 1,523 comments! Thank you ! 🙂 This blog would be pretty pointless without you, you help make it what it is. Cheesy (vegan cheese, naturally :-p ) but true!

What comes next?

• Other than clearing a stiff backlog of posts, which gets added to all the time, and updating the pages mentioned above, I think I want to add and backdate a Workshops category as I am doing a lot of workshops at the moment (both online and face to face) and it would be nice to group my write-ups of them in one place. In order to avoid overlap with the Conferences category, this new category would include only workshops that take place away from conferences.  I might include write-ups of workshops attended too, we’ll see.
• You can also expect more posts relating to teacher development/education/training as this is an area of interest for me at the moment. (And there’s already a category ready for them to be filed into!)
• Learner autonomy-related stuff goes without saying, of course!
• A bunch more conference write-ups will, of course, be appearing during IATEFL in April.
• Also, I would like to continue the conversation about the social side of language learning (see top ten list of blog posts above!) with David Petrie. We had planned to but haven’t quite got round to it yet. Must rectify that.

Aptly enough, given this milestone, this afternoon I am doing a session for my colleagues at the ELTC which is all about development and sharing ideas for developing as teachers. It is based on the online session I did for the TDSIG conference a few weeks ago and I think it could work really well as a face-to-face workshop – I guess this afternoon will tell! One thing for sure is that I will learn. From any participants who do attend and from the experience of delivering. (My workshop delivery goals have shifted from survival to refining and developing my technique – the same shift that happened in my teaching sometime after completing my CELTA, I suppose!)

Thank you all for visiting and reading posts on my blog over the years, it’s been great having you and I look forward to seeing more of you in time to come! 🙂