#AndersonEdTech: 100 Posts Later!

Who woulda thought?!?!?!

In December 2015, I created this blog to get my thoughts out into the universe.  I had blogged before, but I didn't keep up with it, mainly because my blog was part of my MySpace page, something that after a while, I deleted and moved on with my life, but didn't take the blog with me (I would love to go back to see what I wrote all of those years ago, if only I could pull up my deleted MySpace page).  A little over three years later, this blog is still going and this post marks my 100th edition of Anderson EdTech.  So much has changed in those three years and I wanted to use this post a way to celebrate and recognize those changes. 

When I got the writing bug again, I knew what I wanted to do with this blog.  I wanted to use this blog as a platform to showcase my life as a professional and as a person.  Some people write blogs that are strictly professional (see Ditch That Textbook, Control Alt Achieve, and Teacher Tech for Mark Manson's, the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which if you have not read yet, it's a poignant and vulgar, perspective on how we as a species need to relax some), I wanted to make mine a hybrid of the two.  That being said, the initial title for my blog was Tall Tales of Anderson, with the description stating that it would be a little bit of education, a little bit of personal life, and a little bit of wisecracking about various things without getting too controversial. 
examples), some write blogs that are strictly personal (check out

In the beginning, I wasn't really promoting my blog much.  Frankly, I wasn't too sure how to do it and my thought was also, "Are there really many people out there that would be interested in what I have to say?"  I had my Facebook profile where I would occasionally blast it out, same with my Twitter account, but otherwise, I didn't have any other way to get it out there. 

Speaking of my Twitter account, when I first started the blog, I had only had my Twitter account for about 9 months.  I was becoming more active on Twitter, using it more for professional growth at that point rather than a class communication tool (kids weren't on Twitter as much, as Instagram and Snapchat, two social media platforms that I didn't use, and still don't use, were more to the kids' liking).  Back then, my Twitter handle was @AndersonKnowsIt, something that my students at the time came up with for me, because, according to them, if they had a question, 99 out of 100 times, I had the answer to it (those that did use Twitter even started to use #AndersonKnowsIt, but it turns out that one was very popular with fans of MMA fighter Anderson Silva).  Once my Twitter account and my blog started to take off a bit into mid-2016, I decided that it was high time that I "trademarked" myself. 

When I attend conferences now, I put this logo
on my name badge and people "recognize"
me from Twitter!

While I thought Tall Tales of Anderson had a nice ring to it and it flowed well, it didn't have the same ring on Twitter, and it was certainly more than the 15 character limit of a Twitter handle.  But I decided that I really wanted to sync things up and really make a brand of myself, much like you see with The Weird Teacher, Teach Like a Pirate, Shake Up Learning, and the countless others out there that are known as much by their Twitter handle and logos as they are their actual name (Doug Robertson, Dave Burgess, and Kasey Bell, if you are keeping score).  If memory serves me correctly, I changed my Twitter handle first.  As much as I loved that my students created it, at the same time, it made me appear arrogant, in my opinion.  Because so much of what I was tweeting about had something to do with educational technology, I switched it over to @AndersonEdTech.  Shortly thereafter, I changed the blog from Tall Tales of Anderson to Anderson Edtech as well and bought andersonedtech.net (.com was not available).  Then came the logo, a simple combination of one of my Bitmoji images smiling and giving two thumbs up, a blue background, and a typewriter-style font that was classically beautiful. 

Over the course of 100 posts, I have stuck mostly to educational topics, but I have steered away at times.  I wrote about my concerns after the most recent presidential election in 2016.  I reviewed my new cell phone, a Google Pixel 2, when I got it in November 2017.  I ranted about the lack of mental health services and suicide prevention after Chris Cornell's death in May 2017.  I revealed my own struggles with mental health and depression in a post in March 2017.  And here and there, I have thrown in bits about my career shifts, my move to Northern Nevada, and my reasoning behind giving up on the NFL.  Whatever it has been, I have had a lot of fun writing this blog for the last three years. 

I never wrote this blog for followers or page views.  However, as of this writing, this blog has been shared and retweeted countless times, it has been viewed almost 40,000 times, and many comments made in person about how people have read it and enjoy it.  I look forward to the next 100 posts, as there is so much more to talk about and so much more wisecracking to be had!  For you, my reader, I l cannot thank you enough for reading and your support.  And my signature closing to the blog that is posted at the end of each and every one, I'm not sure where it came from, but it's simple and effective. 


Until next time...