Learning on the Blog: Collected Posts for Educators and Parents

Education reform: We don′t need better, we need different

Today′s students are immersed in the digital age, but can our educational system keep up? Best-selling author Will Richardson′s comprehensive collection of posts from his acclaimed blog, outlines the educational reform we must achieve to stay ahead of the curve. The book′s entries present a multifaceted vision of the 21st-century classroom and describe how a social media-changed world has created new opportunities for:

• Project-based learning
• Student-created media that develops critical thinking
• Extending learning beyond the classroom and school hours
• Cooperative and collaborative learning
• Student empowerment and career readiness

The necessary shift will not magically happen, but experts agree that it must happen now. This compilation will inspire educators and parents to engage in the technology their children already embrace, and to take an active role in transforming education to meet the challenges of the digital revolution.

A parent of two middle-school-aged children, Will Richardson has been writing about the intersection of social online learning networks and education for the past 10 years at Weblogg-ed.com and in numerous journals and magazines such as Ed Leadership, Education Week, and English Journal. Recently, he shifted his blogging emphasis to willrichardson.com. Formerly a public school educator for 22 years, he is a co-founder of Powerful Learning Practice (plpnetwork.com), a unique professional development program that has mentored over 3,000 teachers worldwide in the last three years. His first book, Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classrooms (Corwin, 3rd Edition 2010) has sold over 80,000 copies and has impacted classroom practice around the world. His second book, Personal Learning Networks: Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education, was released in May, 2011. His articles have appeared in Educational Leadership, EdWeek, English Journal, Edutopia, and Principal Leadership, among others, and over the past six years, he has spoken to tens of thousands of educators in more than a dozen countries about the merits of learning networks for personal and professional growth. He is a national advisory board member of the George Lucas Education Foundation and a regular columnist for District Administration Magazine. Will lives in rural New Jersey with his wife, Wendy, and his children Tess and Tucker.