Will

“Your visit with us was incredible. In fact, we have been talking about you and quoting you all week. You were the best presenter at the conference!”

—Linda Romano, Hilliard, OH 8/11

For more information, or to discuss a personalized presentation, please e-mail me. Also, here is an updated list of upcoming speaking events. 

Learning in a Networked World: For Ourselves and for Our Students

Keynote: If we have access and the skills to take advantage of it, the Web gives us an easy connection to the people and the resources that we need to learn whatever we want to learn, when we want to learn it. That fact challenges the fundamental beliefs that we’ve held about schools and teaching and learning for over 100 years. As our students graduate into a fast-changing, globally networked world, what assumptions do we need to reconsider about how to best prepare them for their futures? How can each one of us begin to change our own learning practice to better model these new opportunities for our students? And what new challenges do we have to overcome to make sure the idea of school remains relevant in the networked world in which our students will live?

“Will is a speaker of incredible knowledge and passion for using collaborative technologies in order to develop your own personal learning network and affording opportunities for students to do the same in the classroom.”

—Doug Peterson, Ontario

From “Old School” to “Bold School”: Making the Jump from Traditional to Modern Learning

The main premise upon which schools were founded, that content and knowledge and teachers are scarce, has literally been turned on its head by the Web. Today, we carry the sum of human knowledge and access to millions of potential teachers in the phones in our pockets. And in a host of other ways, the idea of a “traditional” school is fading in it’s relevance to the new ways we and our students can learn. Given that reality, what changes? How do we rethink our roles as schools, classrooms and educators at a moment when our students have a growing number of options to cobble together an “education?” This session will discuss the paths that a number of “bold schools” are taking to fundamentally redefine their value as places of learning, not of content and teachers. We’ll discuss the challenges of remaining an “old” school, define the main characteristics of “bold” schools, look at schools that are already bridging the gap, and suggest ways to begin relevant, “bold” conversations around real change in our own schools and communities.

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NEW FOR 2012!

BOLD School Workshops

If you are ready to move from “Old School” to “BOLD School,” I offer a number of full and half day workshops specifically focused on different components of that shift, including:

• BOLD School Leadership
• BOLD School Planning
• BOLD School Classrooms
• BOLD School Communities
• BOLD School Learning

Please contact me for more details.

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The Steep Unlearning Curve: Reframing Our View of Personal and Classroom Learning

Keynote: Author Alvin Toffler is famous for saying “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” In this increasingly easy to access, quick to change world of knowledge, our ability to “unlearn” what we thought was true and relearn it in the context of new information is a crucial skill, not only in a literacy sense but in a lifelong learning sense as well. And as educators, as our traditional beliefs about schooling, teaching and learning continue to be buffeted by the new opportunities of a networked world, the time for some serious “unlearning” and rethinking is surely upon us. But what does this “unlearning” process look like in practice? What types of dispositions do each of us need to bring to the unlearning discussion to make sense of it? And how do we begin to think about unlearning as a part of literacy for our students. This highly interactive presentation challenges educators, parents and others to take a hard look at what parts of the current system may be in need of rethinking, and offers some concrete ways to begin the relearning process both in and outside the classroom.

Personal Learning Networks: The Future of Learning

Keynote: Learning is social, we’ve all known that. Now, with the Web, it’s globally social. To flourish as learners in a connected world, we need a network, one that we can trust, one that we can turn to when we need answers or inspiration or direction. While we’ve always crafted these “Personal Learning Networks” in our face to face spaces, the literacies of doing so online are a bit more nuanced and complex. This session looks at what PLNs are, how they can influence our learning lives and future success, how to begin to construct them using various Web tools, and what the implications are for our students, our schools and our professional practice. We’ll also look at how diversity, balance and safety enter into the learning equation online.

“Will Richardson is an outstanding educator. His work has moved classrooms across America from boring, uninteresting rooms filled with the drone of irrelevant information to beehives of interactivity! Educators who attend his presentations or read his blogs gain valuable insight as to how to transform their classrooms with Web 2.0 tools and strategies. I highly recommend Will’s work and his engaging presentation style to any group or organization seeking an innovative, visionary presenter and an educator extraordinaire!”

—Sheryl R. Abshire, President - Louisiana Association of Computer Using Educators www.lacue.org Past-Chair - CoSN

From Information Literacy to Information Leadership

Workshop: Assessing the relevance and reliability of information is a crucial skill for all educators to master and model. But that type of information literacy is only the beginning. With the explosion of information coming online, each of us needs to use social Web technologies to employ successful strategies for finding, managing and communicating information relevant to our own practice and to our constituents. This workshop will cover the tools that information literate learners are using and the strategies to use them well.

Connective Writing

Workshop: The ability to easily publish to the Internet has opened up all sorts of new possibilities for teachers to help students enhance their writing skills and become more effective communicators. In the age of the Read/Write Web, every reader can truly be a writer as well. Weblogs and wikis provide wide and diverse audiences from around the world for feedback and response. But they also require a more “connective writing” approach, one that can synthesize many disparate ideas from different sources, all connected together through hypertext. This is a think out of the box workshop intended to help you start exploring new ways to make your own writing and your classroom writing more meaningful and more effective.

“I can’t thank you enough for your work on Saturday. I felt as if it was a transformational experience for many of us. Nothing charges up a group of teachers and classroom support staff like the question, “How can we best serve our kids?” You posed the challenge with respect but also with urgency, and those 70 influential teacher leaders are going to go home and get started addressing the issues.”

—Katy Perry, Education Minnesota

UnConference Sessions

I enjoy doing sessions that are based upon audience participation and questions in a more unplanned and relaxed, interactive atmosphere. It’s a chance to ask the questions that are most important to those in attendance and for me to show what’s most relevant. These sessions can be loosely defined by general topics or wide open. Groups of 20-40 work best for these types of discussions.