“Will’s revolutionary thinking has inspired educators worldwide to reexamine how online technologies can change the way we teach and learn.”
eLearning Symposium Brochure
Rochester, NY
October 2005
Here is a list of presentations/keynotes/workshops I can offer. Please e-mail me for more information or to discuss a personalized presentation.
A Shifting Notion of What it Means to Teach
The incredible resource that is the Web is changing much about what we can do with our curricula and our students. The classroom is no longer restricted to four physical walls, and it is becoming a truly collaborative space in which to learn. Every student can be a contributor of knowledge to the world. This networked classroom is a more complicated place for teachers, but it’s also one filled with incredible potential for learning. This keynote challenges educators to rethink their roles to make maximum use of the tools and information now available to them.
Weblogs in Schools
The almost limitless potential of Weblogs as a teaching tool is fostering an explosion of innovative projects, partnerships and techniques at every level of education from elementary school to graduate programs. The ease with which Weblogs allow for publishing of content to the Internet makes them the perfect tool for bringing new voices into to the classroom and building true educational communities that go beyond traditional school walls. This session will highlight best practice uses of Weblogs in schools and include resources on how to get started.
Losing Your Digital Accent
Marc Prensky says that students are Digital Natives while most educators are veritable Digital Immigrants who were not born in to technology and will always keep their accents. We print out our e-mail, prefer plain paper to digital paper, and still use phone books to look up numbers. This divide makes bringing technology to our students more difficult, and our accents many times get in the way of our use of technology. But accents are easier to lose than you might think, especially when all sorts of constructivist technologies are lowering the bar to entry. This workshop is filled with ideas and hands on suggestions to help educators start speaking the natives’ language a bit more clearly.
From Information Literacy to Information Leadership
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, school leaders need to employ successful strategies for finding, managing and communicating what’s significant for their own practice and for that of their constituents. This workshop will cover the tools that information leaders are using and the strategies to use them well.
Connective Writing
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.
New Internet Literacies
Reading and writing are still at the core of literacy, even in the digital age. But the lines between reading and writing are blurring as the Internet becomes both digital library and digital notebook. And with so much more information at our fingertips, it’s even more important to understand how to find, assess, archive and share the information that is most relevant to our practice. This workshop explores the ways in which literacy is evolving and shows you how to get the most out of the Internet.
Digital Teaching / Digital Learning
Online technologies are redefining the face of education. Instead of being limited to physical rooms, six hour days, and 12 or 16 grades, learning online can happen anywhere, at any time, at any age. The Read/Write Web is creating all sorts of opportunities for constructivist, authentic learning that are multi-disciplinary and learner-driven. The role of teachers is changing from that of classroom expert to facilitator and co-learner, and the goals of knowledge are expanding. This groundbreaking workshop offers a new model for teaching and learning in the digital age and gives practical steps for change.
Blogs: The Next Generation
A growing number of educators have been implementing Weblogs in their classrooms and schools, and that means that the uses and potentials of blogs are evolving and growing. Instead of just being about text, blogs are now about video, audio and multimedia. They’re about math and music and much, much more. We’ll take a look at how blogs are changing, talk about how the technology of blogging is changing as well, and try to envision where blogs are going next.
RSS: Connecting Ideas and Knowledge
RSS is a powerful yet fairly untapped tool that educators can use to easily track many sources of information and knowledge. But it’s also evolving into an effective way to connect people and ideas in ways that we’ve be unable to before. Using RSS, we can not only read what others write, we can read what they read, and even read what they create in easy, time-saving ways. This session will take a look at the tools and strategies that can make RSS an integral part of every educator’s professional development and practice.
Podcast, Vodcast, Screencast Nation
Multimedia content creation on the Web increased at the rate of 3200% last year, and it shows no rate of slowing down. From audiocasts to screencasts to video for the iPod, there are all sorts of ways that students and teachers can take advantage of the easy creation and publishing tools that can bring this rich media to a wide variety of audiences. This session survey the multimedia landscape, show how schools are already taking advantage of it, and offer some tips on how to get started.
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