Bill Ferriter is national board-certified teacher who teaches sixth-grade language arts, social studies and science in a PLC near Raleigh, North Carolina. As a Solution Tree PLC Associate and a contract content developer for Pearson Achievement Solutions, Bill has designed professional development courses for educators nationwide.
His trainings include how to structure the work of professional learning teams; how technology can facilitate efficient collaboration; how to use blogs, wikis, and podcasts in the classroom; the role of iTunes in teaching and learning; and the power of digital moviemaking. Bill has also developed schoolwide technology rubrics and surveys that identify student and staff digital proficiency at the building level. He is a founding member and senior fellow of the Teacher Leaders Network and has served as teacher in residence at the Center for Teaching Quality.
An advocate for PLCs, improved teacher working conditions, and teacher leadership, Bill has represented educators on Capitol Hill and presented at state and national conferences. He is among the first 100 teachers in North Carolina and the first 1,000 in the United States to earn certification from the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and has also served on the board. He has been a Regional Teacher of the Year in North Carolina, and his blog, The Tempered Radical, earned Best Teacher Blog of 2008 from Edublogs.
Bill has had articles published in the Journal for Staff Development, Educational Leadership, and Threshold Magazine. A contributing author to two assessment anthologies, The Teacher as Assessment Leader and The Principal as Assessment Leader, he is also coauthor of Building a Professional Learning Community at Work™. His second book—Teaching the iGeneration—was published in June of 2010 and his third—Essentials for School Principals: Connecting and Communicating with Social Media—is due to be published by Solution Tree in the Spring of 2011.
Bill earned a bachelor of science and master of science in elementary education from the State University of New York at Geneseo. He can be reached at wferriter [at] hotmail [dot] com or (919) 363-1870. His Skype name is wferriter and his Twitter name is @plugusin.
