Victoria Ransom - Founder & CEO of Prisma

The New Schools

Show Notes:

Victoria Ransom is the founder and CEO of world's first co-learning network that fully replaces regular school. Prisma is an educational startup providing its own live learning platform for 4th-8th graders (approx. age 9-14). It is Learner-centric, self-paced, outcomes-driven, interdisciplinary, and hands-on. Beyond the reading write and arithmetic, learners also enjoy Clubs, service learning, family events, and more.

Victoria is a homeschooling mother and lifelong entrepreneur. She was also the Founder & CEO of Wildfire, a social marketing software company, which she led to profitability in just one year and built to 400 employees. Wildfire was acquired by Google in 2012 for $450M. Victoria joined Google, leading Wildfire and later Google Express.

Key Takeaways:

00:25 What is Prisma all about?

06:44 How are you able to bring the magic of in-person to online schooling?

13:55 Three examples of amazing hand-on projects.

18:46 What’s your prediction of where this is all going?

26:44 How are your kids? What school are you choosing for them?

28:02 Tell us about Synthesis.

31:03 How do you find Coaches?

34:31 If I’m a curious parent, how much is it and how many students?

38:02 What’s your prediction on what learners will do from 9th to 12th graders?

40:20 How are you making sure that your learners are getting enough exercise and physical movement and free play?

42:35 Where are you geographically?

45:10 What’s a metaphor to compare Prisma to Conventional School?

Quotes:

It’s about working together to solve real-world challenges, discussion, collaboration and sharing ideas.

We literally design a custom schedule for each kid.

Give kids, especially 4-8 graders, some amount of scaffolding and not “do whatever you want” because that’s overwhelming to many kids.

Will this suit everybody? No. But could it suit a lot of people. You get to have a flexible model where you could still do your schooling no matter where you're living and you get to connect with and get to know kids from all over the United States and all over the world.

This is about preparing kids to thrive in their adult lives and to contribute to the world. It's not to get good test scores.

Work is changing so much and so now school has to change to meet that.

We are looking for people that are really, really good at building relationships with kids, really good at giving rich feedback - because we don't have grades at Prisma.

Social Links:

Twitter- https://twitter.com/victoria_ransom

LinkedIn- https://www.linkedin.com/in/victoriaransom

Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/joinprisma/

Website- https://www.joinprisma.com