Determining The Top Education Blogs - Social Media Explorer
Determining The Top Education Blogs
Determining The Top Education Blogs
by

Jason Falls
Jason Falls

As promised, today I’m sharing the results of some recent research I conducted into the top education blogs on the web. As an experiment, both for a client and for a recent presentation on finding relevant bloggers, I decided to cast a wider net that actually needed and share the results with everyone. Before I dive into the methodology or the list, allow me to caveat this research with a couple of notes.

First, because no automated method or service exists to collect the top blogs in a given category, the list I compiled was done so manually. The possibility then, for human error, oversight and just plain not finding all of the blogs that can be considered is there. While I can attest I was thorough in my collection of blogs for consideration, I may have missed a few. If so, let us know in the comments.

Also, to disclose and explain why I was digging around looking for education blogs, the National Center for Family Literacy, one of Doe-Anderson’s favorite social media clients, announced the results of some fairly significant research last week. In order to include top education bloggers interested in early childhood education and literacy issues in the dissemination of the research results, we conducted the research to find relevant bloggers. Because we were focused on early childhood education and literacy as a specific topic, our targeted list isn’t necessarily reflected in the results for the top education blogs. (Hint to PR folks: Don’t just find education blogs. Find education blogs that write about the topic you’re pitching.)

As indicated in my Not All Blogs Are Created Equal post and presentation from last week, I gathered blogs for consideration by doing a couple of searches. When Googling “Top Education Blogs” I found a couple of lists here and here that gave me a good start. I did searches in Technorati and Google Blog Search as well as Bloglines to collect and add to the list. At this point I had just over 100 blogs. I then parsed through Alltop’s education listing to ensure I didn’t miss any listed there. Interestingly enough, several of the blogs listed on Alltop weren’t on my list already. This makes me question Alltop’s requirements for adding blogs. Perhaps they don’t have any. Nonetheless, I was happy to have more blogs to consider. Finally, a quick check of the tags “education” and “blogs” in combination on Delicious.com gave me a list of around 150 total blogs for consideration. Seeing many of them in multiple places, I was fairly confident I had most if not all of the top blogs.

I subscribed to all of them and organized them in a folder in Google Reader, exported my feeds as an OPML file and then stripped out everything but the Education blogs in a text editor. (This is a little technical. For screen shots and explanations, see Marshall Kirkpatrick’s “How To Build A Social Media Cheat Sheet” on ReadWriteWeb. Ironically enough, Marshall also used education blogs as his example. His project ended with an OPML file you can subscribe to of top educations blogs most relevant posts using Postrank, which I used too. His results weren’t a list of blogs, but an RSS feed of the top posts from a list of blogs.) For those of you not hip to what I’m talking about here, an OPML file is essentially a list of all your RSS feeds used mainly to allow you to export all your feeds from one reader and import them to another. I edited my OPML file listing all my feeds so that the only ones in it were the education blogs, allowing me to work with just those 150 or so blogs I collected.

As a favor, the fine folks at Postrank took my file and applied their analysis to each blog to come up with an engagement score for comparison. This numeric value is determined by analyzing comments, trackbacks, Diggs, bookmarks and so on. The different metrics are weighed m ore or less depending upon how much engagement each demonstrates. For more detail, click here. Based on each metric’s value for each post added up over a specific period of time (this analysis is for the last 30 days), you get an engagement score.

So, thanks to Postrank, here are the top 50 education blogs based on engagement over the last 30 days:

RankBlog NameLINKFeedEngagement Score
1Joanne JacobsLINKRSS19931
2Panda’s ThumbLINKRSS19479
3BlogHighEdLINKRSS10900
4High TechpectationsLINKRSS10647
5Ewan McIntosh’s Edu.Blogs.ComLINKRSS7578
6Moving At The Speed of CreativityLINKRSS5399
7Around The CornerLINKRSS5396
8Dangerously IrrelevantLINKRSS4756
9Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the DayLINKRSS4693
10CogDogBlogLINKRSS4220
11Half An HourLINKRSS4218
12Drapes TakesLINKRSS4198
13NYC EducatorLINKRSS4160
14EduwonketteLINKRSS3916
15Oxford University Press BlogLINKRSS3872
16This Week In EducationLINKRSS3756
17dy/danLINKRSS3536
18ApopheniaLINKRSS3250
19Beyond SchoolLINKRSS3133
20The Cool Cat Teacher BlogLINKRSS3128
21The Blue Skunk BlogLINKRSS3095
22OLD Daily from Stephen DownesLINKRSS3081
23Ideas And ThoughtsLINKRSS2974
24The FischbowlLINKRSS2945
25Free Technology For TeachersLINKRSS2236
26Mobile Technology In TAFELINKRSS2021
27The Reading WorkshopLINKRSS1884
28Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, EducationLINKRSS1873
29Open Thinking & Digital PedagogyLINKRSS1864
30FlypaperLINKRSS1724
3121st Century LearningLINKRSS1609
32O’Donnell WebLINKRSS1608
33The Thinking StickLINKRSS1555
34Detention SlipLINKRSS1498
35Hey JudeLINKRSS1392
36SMUG – Social Media University, GlobalLINKRSS1383
37So You Want To Teach?LINKRSS1380
38Always LearningLINKRSS1327
39Remote AccessLINKRSS1313
40Iterating Toward OpennessLINKRSS1263
41Digital EthnographyLINKRSS1229
42Schools MatterLINKRSS1195
43D-Ed ReckoningLINKRSS1131
44Assorted StuffLINKRSS1055
45The Power Of Educational TechnologyLINKRSS1048
46Creating Lifelong LearnersLINKRSS966
47Generation Yes BlogLINKRSS899
48Teach42LINKRSS854
4921 ApplesLINKRSS853
50History Is ElementaryLINKRSS835

Since I don’t really know a great deal about education blogs or bloggers, I will refrain from commenting. Congratulations to those on the list. Keep in mind this is engagement over the past 30 days and just under 150 blogs were evaluated as part of our experiment, all manually found and selected by yours truly.

If you’d like to download the OPML file of all the blogs considered, click here and save the file to your computer. You should be able to then import it into your favorite feed reader and have a subscription to all the education blogs we analyzed.

As always, I’m interested in your thoughts. Was there anything in the methodology that is suspect other than the blogs were selected by one guy doing research? Did we miss any that might have made the top 50? As always, the comments are yours.

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About the Author

Jason Falls
Jason Falls is the founder of Social Media Explorer and one of the most notable and outspoken voices in the social media marketing industry. He is a noted marketing keynote speaker, author of two books and unapologetic bourbon aficionado. He can also be found at JasonFalls.com.

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