How Do I Decide What to Write About?

I’d like to claim that I pick topics of paramount importance in the tech ed community, the pinnacle of edtech conversations and just must be talked about.But that’s not true. I select the topics that interest my readers. It’s a pull-through approach rather than push-through.

You-all communicate what you’d like to read about in several ways:

comments–though not often. I have many loyal readers, but most don’t comment. That’s OK.
Dear Otto–I get many questions through Dear Otto (don’t you love palindromes?). More often than not, they are questions I never considered, like my latest–How Do You Keep Students From Playing with Settings? and my upcoming post What About Teacher Tech Training? (scheduled for April 16th, 2012)
click-throughs–those are the links I provide in posts that people click to garner additional information

I’m going to share the statistics from my click-throughs today. Amazingly, I get an average of 38% click-throughs from visitors–i.e., if I have 2,000 visitors on a day, 760 of them click through to one of the links. That tells me I’m providing material of interest to readers.

Here’s are the top sites you the reader clicked through to so far during 2012:

4-5 of these top click-throughs are from how-to-research posts and 5 from keyboarding posts. When I see this many readers interested in these topics, I know I should write more about them.

How about you–how do you decide what to write?

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Jacqui Murray has been teaching K-18 technology for 30 years. She is the editor/author of over a hundred tech ed resources including a K-12 technology curriculum, K-8 keyboard curriculum, K-8 Digital Citizenship curriculum. She is an adjunct professor in tech ed, Master Teacher, webmaster for four blogs, an Amazon Vine Voice, CSTA presentation reviewer, freelance journalist on tech ed topics, contributor to NEA Today, and author of the tech thrillers, To Hunt a Sub and Twenty-four Days. You can find her resources at Structured Learning.

Author: Jacqui

Welcome to my virtual classroom. I've been a tech teacher for 15 years, but modern technology offers more to get my ideas across to students than at any time in my career. Drop in to my class wikis, classroom blog, our internet start pages. I'll answer your questions about how to teach tech, what to teach when, where the best virtual sites are. Need more--let's chat about issues of importance in tech ed. Want to see what I'm doing today? Click the gravatar and select the grade.