Where in the World are You?

Blogging

This post will not be one that will give you an immediate activity that you can use in a classroom, but I think you can create something similar and then see how you far you can interact with people from all over the world.

For a number of years I have been running a Blog on another site (https://bkerrins63.blogspot.com/) but since I started up Maths Connection I have not had the time to dedicate myself to it enough. I just checked and my last post on it was well into 2019!!!

I call it 'The Bernard Files', and it is far from being a literary masterpiece!! It's just a series of posts that describe things that I have been doing, where I've been and so on.

After starting from scratch I gradually built up a list of followers from around the world, and why they were interested in reading about me is anyone's guess!!

Here is a snapshot of my page views of 'The Bernard Files'.

Check it out, especially if you have trouble getting to sleep!!!

So why a blog?

It came about as I love sharing a story, and the kids I was teaching at the time needed a bit of a prompt for developing their own writing, so we started blogs of their own.

Of course, there were lots of privacy issues to adhere to, but the kids loved seeing their work online and reacting to seeing that their work was being viewed by others around the world.

Importantly, they were now writing for an authentic audience. Previously, their writing was seen only by them, and the teacher, meaning they were often writing for an audience of just one!

Now that their writing was being viewed by a potentially larger audience, greater efforts were being made immediately. What followed next was the regular checks to see how many times their work had been viewed, and where from.

This prompted further investigations as we looked at the geographical locations and pondered why their work was being viewed from there.

Now that they were keener on publishing their writing, they became more interested in going further with other subjects, and pretty soon their maths investigations were going online as well.

The way that they became more interested in their work as a result of blogging was amazing.

I continue to promote the benefits of blogging, but as I've been out of the classroom for the past ten years (not totally) I am unable to give it the time it deserves.

My Current Blog

This brings me to my current blog on Maths Connections.

With the Covid19 pandemic upon us, I was interested to check out where my readers were from, and it was quite surprising.

This graphic shows where my readers are from by country.

As you can see, the USA has the most readers, followed by Australia.

As a classroom teacher, it would be a fascinating activity to discover who the other countries are, and then more about these countries. Another way of blending this work into other curriculum areas.

Let's zoom in on these countries now, and see what cities are involved...

This graphic also lends itself to an investigation on graphing techniques. What do the circles mean? Explain the use of colours?

When the map is viewed online, I am able to zoom in further and see each city and the number of users from that city.

What this graph shows is that there are readers from all over the world. What a fascinating opportunity to investigate more about these places, so much we could learn about them!!

When I looked further, I was able to locate how many readers from each country so far this year, and it really surprised me to see the variety of countries, and how they discovered this blog in the first place!

My final graphic came about after I saw some graphs about the latest spike in the Coronavirus here in Victoria, Australia.

This graph shows the hits on my blog for around the last 10 months.

This graph shows the rate of Coronavirus infections in Australia this year.

It is somewhat ironic and coincidental that the March peaks in each graph are fairly similar, as is the recent spike that we are having.

Without a doubt there are a number of reasons for this:

• I was doing more blog posts while the schools were in lockdown, and we were doing remote learning.

• The spikes occurred after each post was uploaded, which meant that I was getting repeat readers. (Thank You!!)

• The drop occurred around the time that remote learning began to cease.

• I had a huge spike overnight. Is it coincidence that further lockdown of Melbourne was announced overnight?

As I stated earlier, blogging has so many benefits as it means we are writing for a wider and unknown audience. Not everyone will agree with what is posted, and I'm totally fine with that.

Once I see how far and wide the posts are being viewed it amazes me how real our influence can be, and also that it is something that every one of us can do.

It just takes a bit of time.

And for those who say they have no time, just remember that each of us has the same 24 hours in each day!

I'd love to hear your thoughts about some of these posts, I'm happy to produce posts on content that interests you, and I don't get offended by feedback!