William Tally

Bill Tally is Senior Researcher and Designer at the Center for Children and Technology in New York (CCT), part of the Education Development Center, Inc. For over 20 years he has studied and designed educational uses of digital media in schools, libraries, museums and homes. His recent work has focused on how new media can help middle and high school teachers plan and deliver more rigorous, media-rich instruction in the sciences and humanities. He is currently co-Principle Investigator on an NSF-funded project to create an “Electronic Curriculum Guide” to help teachers of high school biology teach EDC’s Foundations Science genetics curriculum. He recently completed 2 years of R&D work aimed at helping National Geographic better reach K-12 teachers with their rich media assets. And he has produced web-based materials for teachers in the history of science, in the history of modern America, and in three art and history-related programs on Annenberg’s Learner.org website. Trained as formative researcher, Tally began his career 25 years ago studying how children used educational TV, print and software materials in the groundbreaking multimedia science and math program The Voyage of the Mimi. He received a B.A. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz, an M.A. in liberal studies from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research (with an emphasis on American cultural history), and a Ph.D. in sociology from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where his dissertation examined children’s and parents’ use of the Web in low- and middle-income homes. He is a frequent speaker and writer on issues of media, children and learning. Among his publications is The New Media Literacy Handbook: An Educator's Guide to Bringing New Media into the Classroom (Anchor Books, 2000), written with Cornelia Brunner.