The Smart Solutions Educational Advisory Board is a group of individuals recognized and respected in their own fields of work who advise Smart Solutions K-12 management regarding issues, trends and products that impact the education technology marketplace. The general functions of the Board are to act in an advisory capacity for the development and operation of Smart Solutions K-12 Members of the Board include individuals who possess knowledge and work experiences that are representative of the occupational area served by the Smart Solutions Educational Division, thus enabling Smart Solutions to better serve our clients.
Dr. Barbara Kurshan
Dr. Barbara Kurshan is the President of Educorp Consultants Corporation, a full service consulting and advisory firm working with educational institutions, corporations and investors.
For the past 4 years, she was the Executive Director of the non-profit organization Curriki and continues to support the mission of open education. Dr. Kurshan also founded WorldSage in 2004 with the vision to create a for-profit higher education system to address education for the 21st Century and currently serves on the Board and as the EVP.
Dr. Kurshan has honed her vision of “what can be” using technology while supporting the growth of new education companies and also developing innovative software products. In her role at Curriki, she helped to build a community that provides the best open source curricula globally. Curriki is a social entrepreneurship organization that supports the development and free distribution of open source educational materials to improve education worldwide.
Dr. Kurshan has been involved with education and technology for over 35 years. She developed the first children’s software products for Microsoft—Creative Writer and Fine Artist—and also created award-winning products for McGraw-Hill, Apple, CCC (Pearson) and others. As a professor Virginia Tech and Hollins College, she helped students research the impact of technology on learning. Dr. Kurshan also publishes articles based on personal research exploring women’s attitudes toward technology, how kids learn using computers, and new ways of learning through understanding. She has authored several books on educational technology including one of the most used textbooks on computer literacy for middle school and high school, Computer Literacy through Applications. She has been quoted in many influential journals and serves as a reviewer and advisor to research projects for the National Science Foundation, the US Department of Education, UNESCO and other government, investor and business groups.
Through her venture fund Core Learning she invested in companies and entrepreneurs who are impacting education. Currently she serves on the board of several education technology companies, including Interschola and Fablevision. Among numerous honors, Dr. Kurshan received the Education Academic Society’s Making It Happen Award and the Highest Leaf Award from the Women’s Venture Fund. She is listed in Who’s Who in Technology Today.
Dr. Kurshan received her Doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction and her M.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech University and her B.S. in mathematics from Newcomb College, Tulane University.
Dick Maxwell
Mr. Maxwell joined Stifel Nicolaus in March 2009 where he had worked at a national investment bank for over three years. Prior to entering the investment banking industry, Mr. Maxwell served as Superintendent of schools in West Holmes and Holmes County for 23 years. He is a past president of BASA and has served as Regional Director on BASA’s Executive Committee, and has served as the Executive Director of the Buckeye Association of School Administrators. Prior to his office as Executive Director of BASA, Mr. Maxwell served as BASA’s Finance Consultant and Governmental Relations Officer. Mr. Maxwell has received the Exemplary Leadership Award, the Past President’s Award and the Distinguished Service Award from the Buckeye Association of School Administrators. He received the Educator of the Year award and the Friend of Education Award from the Ohio Association of Local School Superintendents. He was also awarded the Meritorious Service Award from the Ohio Coalition of Equity and Adequacy of School Funding.
Ian Jukes
Ian Jukes has been a teacher, an administrator, writer, consultant, university instructor and keynote speaker. He is the Director of the InfoSavvy Group, an international consulting group that provides leadership and program development in the areas of assessment and evaluation, strategic alignment, curriculum design and publication, professional development, planning, change management, hardware and software acquisition, information services, customized research, media services, and on-line training as well as conference keynotes and workshop presentations.
Over the course of the past 10 years, Ian has worked with clients in more than 40 countries and made more than 9,000 presentations. He typically speaks to between 300,000 and 400,000 people a year. In August 2002 Consulting Magazine Online named him one of the top ten educational speakers in America.
Ian has written twelve books, 9 educational series and had more than 100 articles published in various journals. Ian is also the publisher and co-editor of the Committed Sardine Blog which is electronically distributed to more than 90,000 people in over 60 countries.
He is also the creator and co-developer of TechWorks, the internationally successful K-8 technology framework, and was the catalyst of the NetSavvy and InfoSavvy information literacy series. He has been a Contributing Editor for several journals and magazines, and is the author of the books "Teaching the Digital Generation: No More Cookie Cutter High Schools" with Ted McCain and Frank S. Kelly, "Windows on the Future" with Ted McCain, and "Net.Savvy: Building Information Literacy for the Classroom". His most recent publications include "Understanding the Digital Generation: Teaching and Learning in the New Digital Landscape", "The Digital Diet: Today's Digital Tools in Small Bytes", and "Living on the Future Edge: Windows on Tomorrow". He is also working on the upcoming books "Literacy Is Not Enough: 21st Century Fluencies for the Digital Age", and "Getting it Right: Aligning Technology for 21st Century Learning".
Ian has also worked for several years with architectural firms to help facilitate planning new learning environments by taking the groups through a visioning process to help them align the thinking of the community (school board, administration, parents, students, community) about what new facilities should look like and how their designing should align with the learning and instructional intentions of the school/district. Over the course of the past 20 years he has been involved in the design process for more than 60 new schools.
He also works with organizations and communities that have lost their market or economic base and wish to explore possibilities for preferred economic futures.
Ian is an educator first and foremost. His focus has consistently been on the compelling need to restructure our educational institutions so that they become relevant to the current and future needs of children. His rambunctious, irreverent and highly-charged presentations and articles emphasize many of the practical issues related to ensuring that change is meaningful. As a registered educational evangelist, his self-avowed mission in life is to ensure that children are properly prepared for the future rather than society's past. As a result, his material tends to focus on many of the pragmatic issues that provide the essential context for educational restructuring.
When Ian is not travelling and speaking, he spends his time sailing in the Gulf Islands on the west coast of British Columbia aboard his boat, appropriately named "The Committed Sardine".