‘It’s hard to tell the signal from the noise.’

Nate Silver

In 2015, the blogosphere continued its unstoppable momentum. The Echo Chamber Uncut was set up by edublogosphere commander-in-chief Old Andrew in March, with over 60,000 blogposts in 2015, over 1,000 a week. There are now well over 2,500 education blogs in the UK. The Echo Chamber team selected 5,600 blogposts to reblog last year: over 15 a day.

After Britain’s general election in May, there’s to be a five-year consolidation of education policy in England at the Department for Education to 2020, with 500 new free schools to be set up over the next 5 years.

Here’s my effort to distinguish the signal from the noise in 2015:

5 top blogposts on this blog in 2015

Organisers

Revision

Workload

Marking

Resourcing

5 treasure trove education blogs

These are the blogs I’ve most often revisited this year:

Reading all the Books on memory

Clio et Cetera on history

Wing to Heaven on assessment

Tabula Rasa on reading

Filling The Pail on research

5 education highlights from 2015

Crowdsourcing Knowledge Organisers

James Theobold’s initiative to share knowledge organisers online is a great idea.

Wellington Festival 2015

Jonathan Simons, Rob Peal, Daisy Christodoulou on Gove’s reforms; Dylan Wiliam on assessment; Ken Robinson on creativity.

ResearchEd 2015

Daisy Christodoulou on comparative judgment; Tim Oates on textbooks; Katie Ashford on grammar; John Brunskill on moral psychology; Jo Facer on memory; Andy Tharby on research; Eric Kalenze on knowledge.

Teaching Learning Takeover 2015

Phil Stock on vocabulary; Chris Hildew on character; Andy Tharby on challenge; Mark Millar on data.

Debating Education at Michaela 2015

Daisy Christodolou and Guy Claxton on teacher-led instruction; Old Andrew and Bruno Reddy on setting and mixed ability; James O Shaughnessy on character; John David Blake and Katie Ashford on Ofsted; Jonny Porter and Francis Gilbert on Gove.

3 intentions for 2016

Re-Resourcing: improving our units on Antigone, Rhetoric, She Wolves and others.

Curriculum Design: creating units on War Poets & Holocaust Poetry, The Crucible; Civil Rights Rhetoric; in History, creating units on the Stuarts, French Revolution, The Slave Trade, The Industrial Revolution; The British Empire and World War.

School Visits: visiting other excellent schools in 2016, after invaluable visits to King Solomon Academy in 2013, Burlington Danes in 2014 and Dixons Trinity Academy in 2015.

3 hopes for 2016

Increasing Signal: hoping The Echo Chamber focuses on reducing the traffic and noise, and increasing the signal from the best blogs in 2016.

Surveying Teachers: hoping Nick Rose’s brilliant survey gets funded and expanded in 2016.

Sharing Resources: hoping the education blogosphere starts to collect and share pupil work in 2016.