It’s that time of year again – in online and print publications everywhere we see the top posts of the year – I’ll include my own in my New Year post. A tradition of my own (actually I am not sure I can call it a tradition as I only started it last year!) is to look at the least popular posts and pages on my blog! It is a useful exercise as it can lead to tidying up / fixing broken links / deleting posts which are no longer relevant or dated and gives me ideas for new and I hope improved versions! Looking at some of these posts and pages though I think some are still worthy of attention – so in no particular order – from the WordPress statistics for 2012: some of the less popular posts and pages!

Words with WolframAlpha – WolframAlpha is rather good with Words as well as Mathematics! Try ‘minus’ for example and you will see you have the option to choose minus as a character, a word or a mathematical definition. Related links and reference materials are also included. If you choose to look at a word definition you will also get a word frequency history and the Scrabble score!

Staying with the subject of words why not give your class a spelling test (turn the sound on)?! UK teachers – the new Teachers’ Standards for 2012 includes Literacy as well as numeracy (see Part 1 – 3).

Thinkfinity – now here is a perfect example of a  post which I realised had links which no longer worked! That has now been corrected. I do like that Marble Mania resource (from Illuminations) I found through this site.

Mathematical Images – If you or your students ever need Mathematical images  are your students aware of copyright issues?

Mathematics Songs – I used this list myself recently when one of my students asked what are Platonic Solids? If you have never heard the Klein Four then do listen!

Sequences – Updated and corrected. If you want to annoy your students try a few of the usual linear / quadratic sequence questions – then give them the first few terms of the eban sequence!

Dancing the Bubble Sort still makes me smile. I have updated the post with the addition of the wonderful Beautiful Dance Moves image.

1000 problems – now I know this is viewed from one of my other blogs (Starters and Plenaries) but it’s definitely worth a look if you have not used it before.

….and apologies if you received an email with a new post ‘Sketchcast’ – trying to delete the Sketchcast post I clearly failed! (For anyone wondering what Sketchcast is – it used to work and enabled you to share handwritten images easily – but there are may other options available – see Online Whiteboards which certainly doesn’t come into the less popular category as it is consistently one of the most popular posts here!)

Now feeling very tidy – throwing stuff out, including old blog posts is quite therapeutic!