Best of Cool Cat Teacher – Reflection on 2014

Look forward at this year but you should also look back to celebrate and appreciate! I'm so grateful for all of you who read the Cool Cat Teacher Blog. Most of these posts are written in the wee hours of the morning, when I come home tired or sometimes in the car (with Kip driving, of course). My goal is to be helpful, inspiring, and informative.

If you've visited my blog in the last two days you might have seen an error screen! It is because I was upgrading to a faster server and we had GLITCHES. I need to make sure that this site can handle the traffic that happens when people like Cathy Rubin mention my name. (See her write up of the top 12 Teacher Blog Posts of 2014. She named my Edutopia piece 12 Ways to Step Back from Burnout as one of her top posts.)

Top Blog Posts of the 2014 on Cool Cat Teacher

Jetpack, my Wordpress statistics service gives me an annual report. Here are the top posts of 2014.

1. 15 Best Google Drive Add-Ons for Education
2. 18 Epic Productivity Apps
3. 5 Reasons I'm moving from Blogger to Wordpress and How I did it
4. Top 10 Tips for Close Reading Activities (this was written by Heidi Morgan with editing from me)
5. How to Mod Minecraft: Youth Digital Has the Class for Your Kid
6. 8 Great Classroom Ideas to Level Up Learning
7. What To Do When Someone Hates You
8. 8 Great Email Etiquette Tips for Educators and Everybody
9. How to Save Your Kindle Notes Into Evernote
10. How to Make it to the End of the School Year
11. Note Taking Skills for 21st Century Students

I'm including eleven posts because there was a big drop off between 11 and 12. These are my eleven “site crashers” – the ones that so many of you read and shared that they account for a large part of the traffic of 2015. You like lists (that is obvious) and how-to posts. The two more socio-emotional posts show that you grapple with the struggles of working with colleagues and fighting burnout (who doesn't?). I posted 140 times (and overall have around 3,500 blog posts!)

This chart fills me with wonder that we are so interconnected! Wow!

 Top Referring Sites of 2014

I use Twitterfeed to automatically send my blog posts into Twitter. My Facebook fanpage has attracted some incredible educators who like to talk about and share ideas. My old blog at blogspot is still where many people go, but I link to this blog and they end up here. For those of you who don't know linkis.com is a link shortener that is often used on Twitter. Flipboard is popular as I have a popular education magazine over there that people read. I'll often flip it into the magazine as well as all of the other stuff I share over there. (You can also read it online.)

Twitter tops the list

Let's Talk: Top Commenters

This is commenters inside wordpress. I'm not sure it is accurate because of the problems I had with Disqus this year (I may have lost some of those comments.) But it is interesting nonetheless. Andrea has a link because she put a link to her website in her profile name. I know the others though and am pretty sure we're connected on Twitter. I like to follow people who have conversations. I'm topping the list because I work hard to reply to people who ask questions and have thoughts.

What I Learned?

I've been hacked, had so much traffic the site went down. I've fought with disqus. I've learned to optimize graphics. I've learned a lot because I've failed a lot!!! But the question my husband always asks the kids when they make a mistake is “what did you learn?”

I'm learning so much about blogging, running my own website, and lots of patience. My friend Lisa Durff has come on with me this year and is helping me post and share Every Classroom Matters shows. The BAMMY for Best Education Talk Show Host was unbelievable and still moves me to tears. I really love that show because I love the incredible teachers who are on it. I also adore my friends at BAM and look forward to incredible things to come!

I'm so grateful to the good Lord for a calling such as this and to all of you who teach me so much through my PLN. Every day we're learning! Right now I'm running (as usual). I have no time to wax poetic as I HAVE TO GET DRESSED AND GO TO SCHOOL. TIME TO TEACH!!

I hope you rejoice in 2014. I hope you ask yourself what you've learned. I hope you move ahead with a vigor to improve the things that didn't work well and to celebrate the things that did. Life can be epic.