Marge Cappo





Marge Cappo received her Bachelors of Science degree in Mathematics Education in 1967 and her Masters of Science in Curriculum and Instruction from University of Minnesota in 1983.

Marge was a mathematics instructor and Instructional Administrator of Research and Evaluation in Hopkins, Minnesota. Later she was Instructional Computing Coordinator and Manager of Development at the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium (MECC).

About Marge Cappo
Quoting from a 1998 interview:


 * I graduated with a degree in math and became a high school teacher in mathematics. Then I went to the district level where I worked on what was called an instructional management project, while working in a classroom half time. This was in the early days of instructional management, and we were actually working with a group out of Stanford. I decided that classroom teaching wasn't the direction I wanted to go in, so I went full time at the district level.


 * What was interesting about that was gaining a non-mathematics perspective and a K-12 perspective. I learned a lot about other disciplines. What we did was go into classrooms and give teachers data on what was going on in their classroom in relationship to the district objectives. We would do periodic testing, train the teachers to read the reports and talk about how they might change what they were doing based on the data they were given back. It was pretty simplistic, because the objectives we were testing were testable, and didn't involve any higher level thinking skills. It also made me believe that data can be helpful.


 * Then I joined the Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium, and left the school district I had been working in. MECC was a state level organization. I started out there as a teacher trainer. I traveled around the Northeast quarter of Minnesota, went into schools and taught teachers about technology. This was in the teletype era. We were a state network hooked up with teletypes. We had all the phone system problems and access problems.


 * Then the Apple came along, and we started a development group which I headed. Before, we had been developing programs for a mainframe system. I eventually became ready to leave MECC and move on to industry. I had always worked for education and government and I wanted a change. I knew I wanted to go someplace that was small enough that I would have an effect. This was really important to me, to have power over decisions that were made and what my role would be. I decided on a small publishing company in New York, Sunburst Communications.

Sunburst, Inc.
Quoting from a Learning in Motion document:


 * As Vice President of Sunburst Communications (1982–1992), her division developed and marketed over 350 educational software programs.

Quoting from a 1998 interview:


 * I helped Sunburst Communications build their computer division over a period of 6-7 years, and became fairly successful at what they were doing, but I realized over that time that I really didn't like New York. I liked my job, but not where I was living. Most importantly was that I had built a business I didn't like, but I was caught in the middle of it. It was my first real management/business experience. This thing grew around me and I looked back at it and I really didn't like what had grown. But it was hard to go back in at that point and change it. I'm not the type of person who would be able to go into a big company and reorganize it. I'm much better at building something from scratch.

Wings for Learning
Quoting from a Learning in Motion document:


 * As President of Wings for Learning (1990–1992), she defined the vision and development of multimedia and technology products in mathematics, science, language arts, interdisciplinary and environmental studies.

Learning in Motion
Quoting from the home page of Learning in Motion:


 * Founded in January of 1993 by Marge Cappo and Mike Fish, Learning in Motion is a California corporation whose ultimate goal is to improve the nature of instruction and learning. For its clients, Learning in Motion provides a diverse staff with multiple areas of specialty; for its customers, a growing line of high-quality products; and for its own employees, a work environment that is a learning place. At Learning in Motion, research and collaboration are encouraged, and personal and professional achievements through inquiry and reflection are always honored.

Awards and Honors
Quoting from the home page of Learning in Motion:


 * Marge has designed over fifty award-winning programs, one of which received the “Program of the Decade” award from Classroom Computer Learning. Marge was named “Educator of the Decade” in 1990 by Electronic Learning Magazine, and honored in 1999 as a “Pioneer in Educational Computing” by the National Education Computing Conference.

Author or Authors of this Page
The initial material for this page was provided by David Moursund.