I was looking at Google Analytics to see what was most popular on my blog. Then I got the idea to look at the last two years and compare them to each other. Fascinating stuff.
The title refers to the fact that I don’t think when I write that I have any idea what will capture the attention of the blog-reading public.
This article on how to write a character analysis appears to be my top scorer. I had 15,000+ visitors to that post in the last year, which is a 25% increase over the year before. I had actually figured this out without Google Analytics because students leave lots of comments.
The next most popular article is on informal assessments. I had almost 12,000 visitors for that page, which is a 179% increase over the year before. Clearly informal assessment has become more important or what I wrote matches what people were looking for.
The fifth most popular article is Beowulf: A Multimodal Presentation. For that article I listed the sites I thought were most useful after plowing through 44 pages of Google. Apparently lots of people who know the lingo are looking for something having to do with Beowulf. By the way, this article had 2,000+ visitors two years ago and more than doubled for this last year.
I must be doing something right.
The interesting thing is that I had no idea that character analysis would be a big issue. I started out just writing a bit piece. It got so many hits that I significantly expanded it until I have about ten blog posts which are actually directed at students and not teachers, the planned audience for this blog.
Five people have commented on assessments, so I know why that has gotten a lot of hits, especially since the site I took the information from has disappeared. (Too bad. It was a great site.)
But I have no clue why Beowulf’s multimodality is suddenly hot, or at least lukewarm.
The image from this post is by Phillip Martin.