Ross Morrison McGill is deputy headteacher at Quintin Kynaston, an 11 to 18 comprehensive school in St John’s Wood, north west London, but still makes time to blog several times a week.
Mr McGill started his @TeacherToolkit website in 2010 and started blogging two years later.
Since then the site has amassed more than 3.2 million views, is ranked 27th in the world by Teach100, and has been named as the number one teaching blog in the UK for three years running by PR company Vuelio.
Thanks to Mr McGill’s blog, his Twitter feed (he has 111,000 followers and tweets regularly during the day), and the two books he has written about teaching, he is now one of the best-known teachers in the UK.
Mr McGill blogs about a whole host of education-related subjects, from life as a deputy head to coping with exam results.
He is convinced that writing about teaching helps his own professional development as well as that of others.
“Blogging is good for reflection,” he said. “The dialogue and content of my blogs change according to what is going on in the teaching profession or in my own job.
“I use a dictaphone to record a skeleton blog, email it to myself and then spend 30 minutes to an hour editing the blog before publishing.”
The blogs he is most proud of include posts about Ofsted meetings, lesson observations and sharing resources.
One that particularly stands is called The Marking Frenzy, about the importance of “quality not quantity” when it comes to marking.
@TeacherToolkit’s 10 tips for education bloggers
- Whatever you blog, make sure you are consistent with content, quality and frequency.
- Stay away from pointless arguments on pedagogy and political ideology.
- Simply share what you are doing in your day-to-day work.
- Be true to yourself and share content “you know works” in your classroom.
- Write about what you care about.
- Avoid blogs about products.
- Blog for one purpose – to reflect on your own professional development.
- Write the occasional blog about “you” to allow your readers to know more about the person behind the machine.
- Learn HTML.
- Listen to your readers. Occasionally they will criticise, suggest and appreciate what you write and share online.
- You can read @TeacherToolkit at http://teachertoolkit.me and follow Mr McGill on Twitter at @TeacherToolkit