This post marks the fiftieth such publication on this blog, a milestone I couldn’t conceive of almost ten months ago when I awkwardly began this endeavor by compiling a (far-too) exhaustive best-of-web installment and publishing it against an all-black backdrop that infuriated many of my early readers. Since then my posts have ranged from the professional to the personal, to collaborations and glimpses of my classroom, to treatises on the work and thoughts of others, and continue to expand in the scope of topic and tone, and continue to define me as a blogger, writer, teacher and human being. If I have learned in these fifty posts anything about what makes a good blog post: it is anything that I wind up sharing on my blog. This doesn’t mean that I think every one of my posts is gem worth global digestion, but rather that by continuing to create, and permitting my posts to include everything, and anything, so long as they speak for me, and report on my view of things – be they educational or otherwise –  I am further defining what my blogging can and will be. Looking ahead, that is an exciting prospect to behold.

In these fifty posts this blog has been visited by more than 2,000 different people. They have come from 302 cities in 44 countries on five continents. According to Google Analytics, these have been the blogosphere’s most viewed posts (interestingly, in as much as ‘format,’ or topic, they are as varied as my interests, and representative of the teacher’s life by random, yet authentic samples):

1. Don’t Stop Believing in Santa Claus (Your Mission Should You Choose to Accept it): Though we haven’t quite gotten there yet, these two posts – viewed more than 400 times – are the record of an attempt at a collaborative project that was a good taste of what pulling off the ultimate global singalong requires. Whether the recording of our students at our Last Day of School Sing – Along (held as an optional ‘assembly’ for anyone wanting to join this pep rally filled our cafeteria multi-purpose room to the rafters with holiday cheer and the voices of our students and staff – is eventually joined to that of others on other continents or not, our school’s digital media students are at work piecing together a short film of the live performance, both on stage and in the crowd, that promises to be only the beginning of a project that will hopefully grow in the years to come.
2. The Long Way Home – Though it is technically a ‘page,’ and not a post, The Long Way Home is the written record of a cross-country road trip with my sister on my way home from five years spent living in Arkansas at university.
3. Edublogs Awards Nominations – At the end of November, I was honoured to be nominated by Dave Truss for one of these annual awards that are a great way to hear what others have been reading, and who has gotten them thinking. Though I wasn’t shortlisted for an award, my contributions of nominees were almost more of a milestone in joining the blogging community, as they were viewed by almost two hundred people in the past month.
4. To Find Your Own Way – Arguably home to the best photograph on my blog, this post is testament to the direction our class is poised to take, as it shared the collected voices of our grade nine students in the fourteen directions taken with their Eminent Person Speeches.
5. A New Year (…and my love of teaching grammar) – Testament to the blog’s growing audience if nothing else, I wrote this resolution to get back to basics in my instruction of English (even as I delve deeper into the realm of technology and web 2.0 authorship) after reading a lot of Jim Burke’s English Companion Blog (I couldn’t find a way to work his namelink into the original post, but do want to bring him to your attention as an eloquent teacher who writes as I would wish to).

As the blog has gotten older, and become more a part of my daily practice,  I have only posted with increasing frequency. With every post, as well as visitor, this blog becomes more of an honest reflection of the teacher I am becoming alongside it. I have been happy to share the last fifty such posts with everyone who has landed here, whether by being a personal connection, or one gleaned otherwise through the web, and look forward to another fifty posts – which will no doubt be here sooner – spent learning alongside you.