BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--DreamBox Learning®, (www.dreambox.com), the leading intelligent adaptive learning™ company, today bolstered its executive ranks announcing three seasoned veterans from the technology and education sectors who will be instrumental in accelerating DreamBox Learning’s growth and market leadership. The company named Greg Long as its Senior Vice President of Product Development and Patti Smith as its Vice President of Marketing and Product Management. Mr. Long and Ms. Smith join Sherri Bealkowski, Vice President of Sales and Client Care, who joined DreamBox Learning in February 2011.
“It is a very exciting time for DreamBox Learning as we expand the senior management team and continue to embark on a highly aggressive growth trajectory,” said DreamBox Learning CEO and Chairman of the Board Jessie Woolley-Wilson. “The combined talent, vision and track record of this new leadership team will uniquely position the company to shape the future of learning and propel innovative education technologies like intelligent adaptive learning into the classroom, resulting in academic progress for all students.”
“This seasoned executive team will fast track DreamBox Learning into realizing its potential as a game changer,” said Reed Hastings, DreamBox Learning board member. “DreamBox has the ability to completely revamp today’s linear model of classrooms into a more malleable learning environment, one that assesses each student’s knowledge and adapts lessons accordingly. Not only will this help students excel, but it supports teachers in an age of growing class sizes.”
DreamBox Learning’s expanded executive team steps in immediately. Mr. Long will manage DreamBox Learning’s curriculum, software development and engagement teams. As a 15-year veteran of the education technology industry, Mr. Long has played an integral role in helping grow companies by building high performance development teams in an array of areas including content, software development, quality assurance, product, and program management. Previously, he was a trailblazer at Rosetta Stone as Chief Product Officer overseeing product development that resulted in the creation of highly personalized interactive tools that tapped the natural language learning ability in all users. Mr. Long also held the post of Senior Vice President of Corporate Development for the company, and was instrumental in growing Rosetta Stone from $90 million to more than $250 million before it went public in 2009. Prior to that, Mr. Long was vice president of product development at LeapFrog SchoolHouse where he partnered with Ms. Woolley-Wilson. Before that, he served as Vice President of Content Development at The Learning Company (a Mattel Company).
Ms. Smith will oversee marketing and product management for DreamBox Learning. She brings 20 years of marketing educational solutions in the K-16 segment to her new post; nine of those years focused on developing and promoting products for institutional sales with an emphasis on math. Most recently, Ms. Smith was Vice President of Portfolio Management, K-12 Mathematics and Specialty Markets with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She directed a product management team responsible for K-12 Mathematics, STEM and Advanced and Elective products, driving a combined annual revenue of $350 million in 2010. In this role, Ms. Smith oversaw product strategy through all phases of the lifecycle in this post from capital investment to concept development, pricing and promotion. Ms. Smith’s latest efforts focused on understanding the classroom implications of and providing a strategic response to Common Core State Standards for mathematics. In fact, within a year of the final standards, she brought four Common Core Mathematics series to market. Prior to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Ms. Smith was Director of Marketing at multimedia publisher Thinkwell Corporation, where she played a key role in the company’s first product launch, expanding product usage to more than 350 colleges and universities in less than 18 months. Before that, Ms. Smith held positions of increasing responsibility at Kaplan Educational Centers over a period of eight years.
Ms. Bealkowski, who heads sales and client care for DreamBox Learning, brings a history of expansion and results to the post as a seasoned 30-year technology executive with deep education expertise. Prior to joining the company earlier this year, Ms. Bealkowski was Chief Operating Officer for education software start-up Intand Corporation, where she ran day-to-day operations and positioned the company for accelerated growth. Before that, she served as an education technology consultant for a variety of organizations and also sat as the Interim Chief Information Officer at Seattle Public Schools. Prior to that, Ms. Bealkowski served as a General Manager at Microsoft for more than a decade where she oversaw U.S. Education Sales and Services and charted the company’s worldwide education strategy, growing that business to $1 billion worldwide. She also launched the Microsoft Partners in Learning program, a $250 million investment that boosted schools’ access to technology in more than 100 countries. Ms. Bealkowski began her career at IBM in product development, enterprise sales, and regional channel development.
About DreamBox Learning
DreamBox Learning was founded in 2006 in Bellevue, Washington and acquired in April 2010 by the Charter Fund in partnership with Reed Hastings, a widely recognized educational philanthropist and CEO of Netflix, Inc. The intelligent adaptive learning company launched a Web-based platform and its first online learning product in January 2009, and the program has won more than 20 top education and technology industry awards. DreamBox Learning K-3 Math targets elementary students and delivers more than 500 core lessons with unlimited variations based on the Common Core State Standards. DreamBox Learning software is designed to teach and reinforce key mathematical concepts through effective, individualized instruction in an engaging and fun manner. The product’s patented “engine” constantly assesses each student’s mathematical understanding, provides the most suitable level of difficulty, hints and encouragement at the right pace for that child, and decides which next personally appropriate lessons to offer for subsequent choices. The company’s first product, DreamBox Learning K-2 Math, was followed by the DreamBox Math Classroom in April 2009 and DreamBox Learning K-3 Math in April 2010. More information is available at www.dreambox.com.