A recent ASCD Smartbrief highlighted TLN blogger Bill Ferriter's InService guest blog post "The Curse of the Digitally Illiterate" and his February 2009 Educational Leadership article "Learning With Blogs and Wikis". In his blog post, Bill gets tough on the issue of educators' digital skills: "There are hundreds of teachers that haven't yet mastered the kinds of tools that have become a part of the fabric of learning—and life—for our students." In Educational Leadership, Bill shows the path to using those tools effectively and explains how he has fueled his own professional development with blogs and wikis. He writes: 

Thousands of accomplished educators are now writing blogs about teaching and learning, bringing transparency to both the art and the science of their practice. In every content area and grade level and in schools of varying sizes and from different geographic locations, educators are actively reflecting on instruction, challenging assumptions, questioning policies, offering advice, designing solutions, and learning together. And all this collective knowledge is readily available for free."

Bill reveals how to use RSS feeds and aggregators to make the most of the abundance of learning opportunities available around the net. His blog The Tempered Radical is a rich example of these opportunities. At the Radical, which won the Edublog Award for best teacher's blog in 2007, BIll shares assessment tools and digital examples of student work such as voicethreads and wikis. He recently brought Readicide author Kelly Ghallager to his blog, drawing a national audience of educators into a conversation about literacy.