Looking back at the most popular blog posts of 2022, it’s clear that educators are craving innovative, flexible and thoughtful ways to use tech for learning, as they delve deeper into topics such as digital citizenship, creativity and professional learning. Here’s the list of ISTE’s most-read posts of the past year. 

1. 4 Benefits of an Active Professional Learning Community

A professional learning community is a team of educators who share ideas to enhance their teaching practice and create a learning environment where all students can reach their fullest potential. Learn why this is so important.

2. 6 Ways To Use Students' Smartphones for Learning

The days when cell phones were nothing more than classroom distractions are over. Help your students turn the smartphones in their pockets into high-powered learning machines.
 

3. Create AR Using These 5 Apps

Immersive technology like augmented reality can deepen student engagement and activate learning through hunts, breakouts and labs. Check out some apps that support lessons in creating augmented reality for K-12 students.
 

4. 5 Reasons Why It Is More Important Than Ever to Teach Creativity

Teaching creativity helps students engage with the content and makes learning more meaningful. Read these five reasons why you should teach creativity and learn how to incorporate this important skill set in your lessons.
 

5. The Hottest Topics in Edtech for 2022!

These are the 8 hottest topics in edtech based on proposals submitted by educators for ISTELive. The list illustrates a level of sophistication and maturity as tools and gadgets take a back seat to pedagogy and learning design. 
 

6. Top 10 Sites to Help Students Check Their Facts

One of the best ways to help students be good digital citizens is by teaching students to be vigilant about verifying information before posting it on social media. A good fact-checking site uses neutral wording, provides unbiased sources to support its claims and reliable links.
 

7. 30+ Tools for Diverse Learners

Flexibility is key to creating the kind of learning environments that students need to prepare for their future, according to the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework. Flexibility  allows educators to accommodate their students’ natural variability in learning preferences.
 

8. Turn Your Classroom Into a Personalized Learning Environment

Personalized learning is the purposeful design of blended instruction to combine face-to-face teaching, technology-assisted instruction and student-to-student collaboration to leverage each student’s interests for deeper learning.
 

9. 5 Surprising Results of a Self-Paced Classroom

The self-paced classroom allows students to discover how they learn best and gain valuable information about their own learning that they can carry with them for life.
 

10. The 5 Competencies of Digital Citizenship

The skills required to thrive as digital citizens go beyond just online safety. They include recognizing fact from fiction online, using technology to engage in civic action and being respectful of people with differing viewpoints from our own. 

Jerry Fingal is an ISTE blogger who writers about the transformative power of educational technology.