The SIIA (The Software & Information Industry Association) have just announced the winners for the 2014 NextGen Awards in Mobile. Fishtree is proud to be recognized as the NextGen Most Disruptive and Overall Mobile Award Winner. The following interview between Rhianna Collier, Vice President of Software Division at SIIA, and Terry Nealon, CEO of Fishtree was originally published on SIIA Blog.

Tell us a little about Fishtree and what makes you unique.

Fishtree is a next generation learning management platform that combines learning management, collaboration, curation  and personalization to empower every teacher and engage with every student.   The purpose of the platform is to adapt instruction and resources for every learner, allowing the teacher to access millions of resources, build engaging lesson plans and to adapt lesson for every student, in minutes.  Unlike other adaptive platforms, fishtree makes it easy to individualize instruction for every learner, whilst still allowing students to learn at their own pace.

The company insists that our learning environment should be delivered to any device, with mobile technology playing a key role in reaching students, collaborating and a more dynamic, interactive  experience.

Fishtree allows teacher to access automatically aligned content to any standard such as the common core and adapt these to every learner, and also remediate for every learner with a click of a button.  No other platform offers such ease of use.

Typically, what do your clients look for in terms of your product, and how are you responding to that?

As we focus on student achievement by empowering teachers, we also look to serve the needs of parents and the administration.  Typically our clients are looking for a next generation learning environment, many wish to move away from clunky, older technology that have done little to drive better learning outcomes, and suffer from poor usage.  Two key areas we are focusing on are content alignment, (for example the challenge to align resources and activities with the common core standards in the US) and adapting lessons  to every student in the class.  We make this incredibly easy but importantly it is highly collaborative, secure and you can still perform the same learning management functions as you would with traditional systems.

We are also acutely aware of the need for world class implementation, we see that as a key failing in the industry and a great opportunity to delight our customers.

What does the 2014 NextGen Award for Fishtree mean for your company?

The NextGen award is recognition of the fact that fishtree set out to be a next generation learning environment that appreciates the needs of the changing classroom and society, and did so successfully.  This award points to the disruptive nature of what we are doing in an industry that has been starved of true innovation in platforms and service.  The opportunities presented by mobile devices and networks allow us to reach any teacher and student on the planet, deliver highly personalized, interactive content and data and we have embraced these.

It is also important to note that the award was awarded in the face of competition from other industries, not just edtech, given that these other industries have traditionally moved at a faster pace.

What are your goals for the next 12-18 months? Any specific milestones you are hoping to achieve?

Fishtree continues to bring customers on in the US and through our partners in many other countries where we have launched fully localized versions in Korean, Chinese and most recently Latin American Spanish.  We will continue our growth in these regions and other countries, and expand our alliances program with other technology, publishing and services partners.  We are seeing tremendous opportunities in developing markets like Southern Africa with our partner there and key to this is mobile delivery.

We are also rapidly expanding our R+D, implementation and business development teams and we will treble in size in the next 18 months.  We will also launch our independent user for teachers and homeschoolers where individual teachers and parents can access fishtree, millions of resources, plan their lessons and personalize lessons.

Teachers use Fishtree to plan lessons, find standard-aligned teaching resources, create assessments and see students performance, all in one place! If you’re a teacher, use Fishtree to prepare for your class and understand how well each student is learning. What’s more, it’s safe, secure, collaborative and easy! Try the next generation learning platform or contact us for a demo.