Speakers Ramona Pierson: Education innovator

Ramona Pierson

Ramona Pierson develops tools to revolutionize learning management and assessment systems -- her fourth career after aviation, neuropsychology and software development.

Why you should listen to her:

Ramona Pierson first built careers in aviation, neuropsychology and software development. While studying and examining and learning the details of such diverse disciplines, she became interested in the act of learning itself. She volunteered in a San Francisco school while working full-time in Silicon Valley and, just like that, a fourth career was born.

Pierson completed a master’s degree in education in California, then headed north to take the reins of the education technology department for Seattle Public Schools. She combined her passions and expertise to create software that, in a nutshell, helps teachers teach better. In 2007, Ramona launched a private company with the same goal. SynapticMash Inc. was launched to revolutionize the learning management and assessment systems in education.  

A self-described “data geek,” Pierson contemplated ways to push education and technology through a paradigm shift — to move from web 2.0 to web 3.0. Now the chief science officer at Promethean, Ramona continues to study the act of learning and to explore ways to make our education system work better for students.

 

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Quotes by Ramona Pierson

  • “Close your eyes. Now imagine you have to cross a street. You don’t know how far that street is and you don’t know if you’re going straight and you hear cars whizzing back and forth, and you had a horrible accident that landed you in this situation.” — on learning to cross the street as a blind person

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  • “The biggest change for me was looking down at my hands seeing that I’d lost 10 years of my life. I thought that time had stood still for some reason and moved on for family and friends. But when I looked down, I realized that time marched on for me too.”

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  • “We didn’t have words like crowd-sourcing and radical collaboration when I had my accident. But the concept held true — people working with people to rebuild me; people working with people to re-educate me. I wouldn’t be standing here today if it wasn’t for extreme radical collaboration.”

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More TEDQuotes…

Ramona Pierson: An unexpected place of healing

Ramona Pierson on the Web

Related Speakers

Conferences

  • TEDxDU 2011