2015 - A Review of the Blog

Happy New Year! I hope everyone has had a lovely and restful break! 2015 was an unbelievable year for me and the blog. We passed a million visits to the blog and I published two books - 50+ iPad lessons for Exciting Sentences and 50+ iPad lessons for Non-Fiction alongside Alan Peat. With a few more books in the pipeline and conferences running all over the country, 2016 should be another cracking year!

In this blog post, I thought I would reflect on some of the lesson ideas and posts from 2015 that I really enjoyed doing in class but was also most popular with you guys! So here are my top 5 posts of 2015 -

 5 - Numeracy SATs Revision guides from @GHammondMaths

 This blog was a guest post from @GHammondMaths, who created a valuable resource for teachers in the build up to SATs. He created interactive practise papers where each question linked to a YouTube video that explained clearly the method to solve the question! The post has had over 6000 views and it won't be long before teachers will be using them again. Here is an example of one of the papers - 
Mr Hammond also created a range of similar resources linked to each strand of the Maths curriculum. Mr Hammond also created a different blog post all about taking your daily Maths VID-amins. Click here to read that blog post. 

 4 - Inspiring Reading and Writing through John Lewis' Christmas Advert 2015

This blog post written with @ReadingExplorer was one of the most popular with over 11k views. It was amazing to see how many teachers used the ideas from this blog and then tweeted and emailed examples of work! Although, the video won't be relevant post Christmas, it is the approach towards the video that I feel is more valuable. I met John a few years ago, after he led some training at my school. I believe we both have a unique and interesting approach to using different forms of media in the classroom. If you would like to know more about the joint approach we have to a range of media and how it can be used to improve reading and writing in the classroom, please have a look at our joint conference we are leading in Newcastle, Peterborough and South Wales in 2016 -



This was a blog post that I created at the start of the academic year with a few ideas for teachers to use to try and embrace technology into their teaching to enhance and transform learning in the classroom. It is well worth a read and there is no reason why these ideas cannot be implemented in the upcoming term! The blog post including using tools like Padlet but also encouraged teachers to start blogging with their class. I cannot recommend this enough as it has so many benefits as demonstrated by this infographic -


Virtual Reality has been a tool I have explored a lot in 2015. After purchasing my first Google Cardboard headset back at the beginning of the year, it has been the inspiration for plenty of writing throughout the whole school. As you can read from the blog post it was used to let KS1 children ride rollercoasters. We have explored Virtual Jurassic Worlds, became Deep Sea Divers and most recently delved into the Star Wars universe - 


What made the above example stand out was the fact the Mark Hamill aka Luke Skywalker liked the video on twitter - 

The introduction of more 360 degree videos alongside the Virtual Reality apps means children can be transported to anywhere in the world straight from the classroom!

1- My Golden Rule of Teaching

Now this post was quite unusual for me as it wasn't as about classroom ideas but the philosophy behind everything I do. I pride myself on trying to help and aid teachers with as many useful ideas through this blog. In this post, I felt it was important to also look the the thought process behind a lot of it. I discuss it a lot on my training and from the response on social media it seemed to inspire a number of other teachers. Have a read yourself and see what you think - 


So there you have it, some of my favourite blog posts and yours based on the number of views. Of course, I would love to hear if there has been any other post that has really helped your teaching in 2015 and would like to take this chance to thank everyone for their continued support! Here's to a successful for 2016. 



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