Three years ago, I started blogging and tweeting.   This is my annual stock-take.

A major milestone in the year was passing the 1,000,000 million mark for blog views. The three-year tally is 1,293,000 – a total of about 610,000 for the year which puts my book sales (500) into perspective!  I’ve also gained almost exactly 10,000 new followers in that time – it’s up to 27,600.  I can barely believe it.  The scale of support that I get for this blog continues to astonish me and I’m grateful for all the opportunities, interactions, connections and ideas that flow from the exchange.

I got a bit fed up with things back in March but after a full six weeks off (when, yes it’s true, I even went a whole week without looking at the blog stats even once) I’ve found that I’m enjoying it again. There’s so much to say! The last few weeks have been  mad – especially on Sundays:

In the last 12 months, a few new posts have been particularly popular:

Contemporary educational ideas all my staff should know about – a curation of videos, great for CPD.

10 Silver Arrows – a set of simple ideas that make a difference if you do them and nothing else.

Lesson Observations Unchained. A New Dawn  – celebrating the freedom we’ve all now been granted (or should have been.) People who still grade lessons are kidding themselves – it’s Stockholm Syndrome, nothing less.

OfSTED Outstanding? Just gimme some truth.  This had a remarkable response, including a full reply from Sean Harford himself.  As a result it got a mention on the BBC News website  and then, after Schools Week picked up on Sean’s hint that reliability trials were planned, it was reported again as a  ‘schools face double inspections’ story.

The more recent post about Progress 8 is rising up the charts  – another in the line of data delusion/garbage posts I enjoy writing.

Reflecting the joy of moving to my new school, I’ve also enjoyed the response to all the various Highbury Grove posts – collected here.  It’s a rich source of material and I’ve found sharing the journey incredibly useful and rewarding.

As ever, the biggest hitters are the Bill Rogers post – closing in on 100,000 all-time views by itself – and posts about assemblies and feedback that I wrote ages ago.

There’s a twitter challenge going around – instigated by the indefatigable @teachertoolkit – asking people to share their five favourite bloggers.  I’m not going to follow the rules exactly but I will take this opportunity to highlight five pedabloggers whose work I always try to read whenever they publish something new:

Carl Hendrik http://chronotopeblog.com/

Martin Robinson/ Surreal Anarchy https://martinrobborobinson.wordpress.com/

Andy Tharby https://reflectingenglish.wordpress.com/

Summer Turner https://ragazzainglese.wordpress.com/

Harry Fletcher Wood http://improvingteaching.co.uk/

And these three go without saying: John Tomsett, David Didau and Alex Quigley.

During my short blog-holiday I read more of other people’s blogs than ever. I realised that I’m often making too much of my own noise to listen to anyone else. Expect more blog holidays this year…it’s healthier all round.

Thanks for supporting, engaging, sharing…..one day I can’t help thinking that this will all be over but, for now, I’m still riding the headguruteacher wave.