Happy Friday, everyone! Ho –Ho –Whoa! I am so in the holiday spirit, but there is still work to get done this month, so work we must. But it is an enjoyable task to bring you the scoops so read on now to see what’s new this week….
New roles for colleagues and friends….
North Texas’ third-largest charitable foundation has named a new president and CEO. Matthew Randazzo will take The Dallas Foundation’s top role in mid-2018, succeeding Mary Jalonick, who is retiring after 30 years in the position. Helen Holman, the foundation’s chief philanthropy officer, and Jeanne Whitman Bobbitt, a former foundation board member and nonprofit management consultant, will serve as interim co-presidents until Matthew takes on the job full time.
Matthew currently serves as CEO of the National Math and Science Initiative after joining in 2014 as chief growth and strategy officer. Previously, he was founding president and CEO of Choose to Succeed, a nonprofit that works to bring tuition-free, public charter schools to San Antonio, and as chief growth officer for IDEA Public Schools. As the top executive at The Dallas Foundation, he will take over an organization boasting more than $400 million in assets in over 560 funds. The foundation helps donors create charitable funds to support their choice of nonprofits.
Congratulations to Matthew on his new position!
Education technology veteran Jolynn Shuler has joined Fuel Education (FuelEd), a leading provider of online and blended learning solutions for students in grades K–12, as the new Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Having spent her entire career in education technology, Jolynn has extensive experience working with schools across the country to implement online learning platforms, intervention tools, personalized learning programs, formative assessment solutions, core curriculum programs, and supporting professional services.
In her new position, Jolynn will oversee FuelEd’s national sales team as it coordinates partnerships with schools and districts to help transform teaching and learning using education technology advancements. She will also lead the inside sales team and drive marketing priorities.
Prior to her new role at FuelEd, Jolynn spent four plus years at McGraw-Hill Education where she was a District Manager, the National Director of Platform Sales, and most recently the Vice President of Specialized Markets. She has also served in sales and product management roles at Scantron, Campus Management Corporation, and Learning Labs, Inc.
Congratulations to Jolynn on joining the FuelEd team!
I heard this week from our friend Susan Meell, CEO of MMS Education, and she shared several exciting changes at the company for 2018. In addition to adding a new Chief Business Officer and announcing several staff promotions, they are also moving!
To help lead the transition and the team, Suzanne Caimi Lynn has rejoined MMS Education as Chief Business Officer, a role she filled from 2010 to 2013. She returns after a four-year stint as Chief Financial and Operations Officer at PureRED/Ferrara & Company. Prior to her first role at MMS Education, Suzanne served as Chief Financial and Operations Officer at Princeton Partners for almost 10 years and spent 17 years at Gillespie Advertising/McCann New York, achieving Managing Partner and Chief Financial Officer in 1992.
MMS Education has also promoted Stacey Moyers to Senior Vice President, Client Services. Stacey joined MMS Education in 2011 as Senior Director of Communications and was then promoted to Vice President in 2015. As Senior Vice President, she will oversee all of MMS Education’s client services work, from research and marketing, to content development, outreach, and digital strategy.
Before joining MMS, Stacey served as Director of Marketing at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute and worked as a TV news producer in Baltimore and Philadelphia. In her six-plus years at MMS, she has helped to lead and grow the company’s work with many key clients, including leadership of MMS’s work on behalf of Dairy Management Inc.’s Fuel Up to Play 60 program, in partnership with the National Football League.
Also as part of the company’s restructuring, Pierce Baugh, Chief Information Officer, announced that Ray Osuji has been promoted to Senior Application Developer. He takes on responsibility for leading development of MMS Education’s latest web platforms. A graduate of Rutgers University, Ray first joined the company in January 2014 developing applications for many different clients.
And as of January 2, the team can be reached at:
MMS Education
One Summit Square
1717 Langhorne-Newtown Road, Suite 301
Langhorne, PA 19047
Susan reports that they are very excited about their new space, which allows for a more open environment to support even better teamwork and collaboration. The new office is just 5 minutes from their current location, and the actual move will take place in late December. Since all of email addresses and phone numbers will stay the same, you will have no trouble reaching the MMS team during the transition.
Join me in congratulating Susan and the talented MMS team on their new year news!
Follett Corp. has announced that the company board has named Patrick Connolly to succeed Ray Griffith as president and CEO of the educational wholesaler and services business. Ray has served as president and CEO since May 2015 and will officially retire at the end of the fiscal year in March. Patrick will begin at Follett on January 2nd.
Patrick will join Follett from Sodexo, a Paris-based firm where he was CEO of Universities Worldwide. The unit is a global business one at Sodexo that supports the university and K-12 market in 30 countries, including 850 universities and 750 school districts in the U.S. He began at Sodexo in 1989 as a regional sales rep.
During his tenure as CEO, Ray, a Publishers Weekly Notable Person for 2017, is credited for leading Follett through a series of acquisitions, among them more than 200 Nebraska Book Company retail campus stores in 2015 and the 2016 purchase of Baker & Taylor. Earlier this year, B&T announced it was entering the trade distribution business, and Follett announced it will start a new book fair business to compete with Scholastic.
Congratulations to both of these gentlemen at Follett!
I know many of you follow social selling guru Jill Rowley, who keynoted EdNET in 2016. Jill has been appointed chief growth advisor for Marketo, Inc. to evangelize on behalf of the Marketing Nation and expand the company’s digital sales transformation. A social selling evangelist, keynote speaker, and strategic business advisor, she will report into Marketo Chief Executive Officer Steve Lucas.
Jill will concurrently serve as chief growth officer at Sales for Life, the largest social selling and digital sales training organization in the world. She previously founded her own consulting practice, #SocialSelling, to help sales and marketing organizations evolve their digital transformation. She has a rich history of success driving excellence at enterprise SaaS companies, having spent time at Oracle building a world-class training curriculum for the company’s global salesforce. She joined Oracle through its acquisition of Eloqua, where she helped companies modernize their marketing for more than 10 years. Prior to Eloqua, she worked at Salesforce.com. She has also held notable advisory positions at TrackMaven, HubSpot, and Affinio, among others.
Jill will work internally with Marketo leadership to advise on alignment and best practices, helping to deliver the seamless experiences that all audiences crave. Externally, she will speak at events and spend time with Marketo’s customers and partners, bringing her unparalleled expertise to the entire Marketing Nation.
I know you join me in wishing Jill every continued success!
Authors!
Edthena founder Adam Geller and Annie Lewis O’Donnell have authored a new book that aims to help educators successfully make and implement a plan for using video-based learning as part of the classroom observation and professional development process. The book includes an afterword by professional development author and instructional coaching expert Jim Knight.
Evidence of Practice: Playbook for Video-Powered Professional Learning offers 12 strategies for video coaching – including Video Learning Communities (VLCs), Virtual Walk-through, and Online Lesson Study – that readers can implement in their own districts, schools, or classrooms. The book draws from researcher and practitioner advice to provide a practical and implementation-focused guide immediately useful to educators. The book also covers the research basis for putting video evidence at the center of professional learning, focusing techniques for analyzing video of classrooms, and tactical guidance about recording and sharing teaching videos.
Adam Geller is the founder of Edthena. He started his career in education as a science teacher in St. Louis, Missouri. Since 2011, Adam has overseen the evolution of Edthena from a paper-based prototype into a research-informed and patented platform used by schools, districts, teacher training programs, and professional development providers. He has written on education technology topics for various publications including Education Week, Forbes, and edSurge, and he has been an invited speaker about education technology and teacher training for conferences at home and abroad.
Annie Lewis O’Donnell is an independent educational consultant. She works with intentionally diverse school communities that strive to serve all children equitably and with organizations that train and develop teachers. Annie began her career in education as a second-grade teacher at a public school in Baltimore, Maryland. For more than twelve years, she led national design teams at Teach For America, overseeing pre-service teacher preparation and ongoing in-service support.
Jim Knight is a research associate at University of Kansas Center for Research on Learning, senior partner of the Instructional Coaching Group, and president of Impact Research Lab. He has spent more than a decade studying instructional coaching and has written several books on the topic.
Evidence of Practice is available for purchase in print and eBook formats for $27.99. To learn more, go here.
That’s it for this week. I do so love this joyful season. Decorations are everywhere, and you can be sure shopping is well on its way! Baking is just around the corner, and I look forward to all the festive luncheons with friends and evening parties. And this grandma is having all kinds of fun with the youngest two and their programs and activities. Go and enjoy the wonder of the season, friends! Till next week….Vicki, the Snoop
[Send me your scoops at bighamv@aol.com and be sure to follow me on Twitter @Snoops4Scoops #SheSnoops]
