Top 5 Education Blog Posts of 2017

With the end of the year rapidly approaching, I thought I would share the top five blog posts from the year (by views):

ONE:

Digital Technologies For Learning – What The Research Says

Coming in at first place by quite some margin was my summary of the research from the New Zealand Council for Education Research (NZCER) into the use of digital technologies in the Primary and Intermediate ages schools of New Zealand. I’m not surprised this ended up being very popular as it was recent research, based off NZ schools, and was summarized in an excellent infographic (worth clicking the above link for that alone!).

I am pleased that educational research continues to be a source of interest and a tool for informing the pedagogical practices within New Zealand schools.

TWO:

What’s The Difference Between ICT Capabilities & Digital Technologies

Again, another terrific Infographic that could be shared with teachers featured heavily in this blog post shared under the Creative Commons License. It touches on:

1. ICT Capability & Digital Technologies In the Australian Curriculum
2. Examples of when to use Digital Technologies or ICT
3. What it looks like in the classroom

Well worth checking out if you’re responsible for driving eLearning and Technology competency within your school.

THREE:

Minecraft: Education Edition – Buying & Managing Licenses

One of a number of blog posts on Minecraft:Education Edition I wrote this year, this was actually one of the very first ones I wrote way back in January 2017.

I think the reason this has proved very popular is the step by step guide on how to acquire licences, but also the link to the blog of a real teacher at a Microsoft Showcase School who shared her experiences of acquiring M:EE licenses and deploying them for students to use.

FOUR:

Guide For Deploying Office365 ProPlus

I suspect I referred a lot of schools and IT administrators to this blog post as there were many, many queries this year about the difference between installing the Volume Licensing version of Office 2016, versus the subscription based Office365 ProPlus. The above guide includes a lot of very useful links for the more technically minded who are interested in ensuring the devices they’re deploying Office to receives all the latest feature updates that are regularly rolled out.

FIVE:

Microsoft Teams For Education Is Here – And It Is Awesome!

With the discontinuation of Microsoft Classroom (Preview) the emphasis shifted to Teams For Education and lots of schools wanted the information on what it was and how it would help them. This post contained some helpful overview videos and links to more technical resources on how to get started.

Subsequently, a number of schools have started trialing Teams in anticipation of rolling it out for Teachers in 2018.

Bring On 2018!

The new school year will roll around very quickly and I can’t wait to see what trends will emerge on this blog over the coming 12 months.