VKidz

Vkidz Inc is a small company with innovative approaches to education. Vkidz’s approach is to rely on time-proven best practices in education and apply them in new ways made possible by the changing educational and technical environment. The key components of our mission:

1) Pioneering software by creating new applications that are considerably easier to use, more effective, and/or less expensive than existing applications.

2) Rely on proven best practices from education. Our contribution is the embedding of existing best practices into software, not trying to reinvent education.

3) The real need of teachers and parents and students is for educational solutions, not pieces. The web is full of many great educational games which rarely have any real impact on education. Our mission is to create games and software that transform the overall curriculum and educational experience.

4) Constant process improvement. Listen to the users. Update and improve. Keep it fun, make it meaningful, and look beyond getting through the next test.

The successes to date:

VocabularySpellingCity.com - A  leading web site in schools and for consumers, the innovation is the automation of  word study and the linking of in-depth resources and learning objects with teacher-generated lists. The automation allows teachers to manage differentiated learning at either the student group or individual student level.  Typically, teachers integrate the weekly word list with skill-building such as  handwriting, vocabulary, reading, fluency, and reading. VocabularySpellingCity.com facilitates this integration while dramatically simplifying and automating the process. Also, kids and teachers love it.  VocabularySpellingCity.com was used by about 5% of American elementary school students each month during their second year of operations (2009-2010).

Time4Learning.com - Providing an integrated progressive online educational system to the homeschool  and consumer market for PreK-8th Grade.  Time4Learning.com has been successful in providing online education at a reasonable cost to this market through using cutting edge marketing techniques.

Time4Writing.com - Providing personalized writing tutorials using a web-based curriculum. The curriculum follows best practices for teaching writing; the innovation is providing the service over the web.

The founder and president of Vkidz is John Edelson.  John Edelson has a long involvement in computers used for education and visual simulation starting with his years at Silicon Graphics in the late 1980s . At the 3DO Company in the early- and mid-90s, he was  involved in the video game transition from games built with simple algorithms with 2D sprite graphics to games with real-time 3D photorealistic graphics and physics engines.

Mr Edelson was the producer on Croc, Legend of the Gobos, a Sony Playstation game that went Platinum.  He was the turn-around manager at Argonaut – a 100 person diversified entertainment and technology company in London.  He managed it for three years improving quality, growth, and profitability. He spun-out and joined ARC, a new company in the semiconductor intellectual property industry.  Mr. Edelson, as Senior Vice President of ARC, helped grow ARC from 10 to 300 people.

Since 2002, Mr. Edelson has worked on educational software.  In 2002, Mr Edelson consulted to Vcom3D, an educational software company with products for the deaf and hard of hearing and Time2Read, an educational software company providing standards-based online programs to elementary school systems. Mr Edelson founded Vkidz  2003 initially licensing a software application that he  repurposed for consumer use  as Time4Learning. Vkidz started development of VocabularySpellingCity.com and Time4Writing.com in 2007, and Science4Us.com in 2009.

John Edelson has a BA from Yale cum laude and an MBA from Harvard. He served in the Peace Corps in West Africa for two years. As the proud father of three children, Mr. Edelson has a deep interest in improving education through technology.