FIRST OFF, a warm congratulations to Vicky Loras on her 3rd year of blogging!!! Wild how the time flies by, eh. I’m 1/2 way there and this is actually my 150th post, and I feel like taking up a challenge by Adam Simpson asking us to highlight our favorite posts from 2012 as he did in 2011.
Would love to hear what your top 12 from 12 are as well (hint, hint “challenge”), and without further ado…
1) This year I started venturing more into online teaching and this post I asked for 100 words of wisdom from folks who have been on the online teaching path for years.
2) The most remarkable blogging moment of the year was certainly the 7 things you should do to be a happier teacher. You hear that world “viral” in social media every now and again and this seemed to be it for my blogging career!!! 535 tweets, 691 FB shares and 75 comments… and it makes sense that folks shared it because it’s about being HAPPIER teachers!
3) This year I must say I’ve been very proud of the Edulang team as we’ve carved a path that few would dare— opening up our materials to anyone around the world for the price they felt they should pay. Here was the first post of our success after 100 days of doing business in a new way.
4) Likewise, this decision felt right as well as we decided to offer any of our applications for free to every ELT trainer that wanted to test them out.
5) It has been a revolutionary year and past decade in ELT and technology is on the minds of many— How is it helping? What’s the teacher’s role? What’s next?… and the post “Is testing online the next step?” was an interesting exploration along those lines.
6) Still along the same lines, I asked my readers to read into their future— if they thought that they’d be teaching online in 2020.
7) The number one reason to learn a foreign language… with such a superlative statement and it was a fun exploration and there were tons of great comments.
MUCH Less fun of an exploration was when we discovered that some of Edulang’s materials had been plagiarized here by a major publisher.
9) I did two blog challenges exploring what “teaching is like” for us teachers— one was to find a metaphor and another was to choose a quote that described your teaching style.
10) I did a number of guest posts or interviews with new leaners which were a lot of fun. Here’s one on our TOEFL® test simulator, another on our TOEIC® test simulator from a teacher and a student, and finally one on English Addicts. (I know I’m kind of cheating on #9 and #10 here providing more than one post but it’s a general area) 
11) One of our talented materials writers, Paul Brett, did a guest post as well where he shared how the S. American jungle lead him to doctorate studies in ELT and educational technology, and also how that brought him to contribute to our app, English Addicts.
12) Last but not least… hmm… maybe “Where does Your Coffee come from… and your Teaching Materials?”
Thank you Adam for encouraging us to review our blogging year AGAIN! I know many of us put so much thought and care into this practice and to see it all like this globally is a great reminder of how powerful it is.
Happy blogging in 2013 all
-Brad
