Bio

Over the course of more than twenty years, Mark Svorinic has proven himself to be a dedicated contributor to the effective development and implementation of educational technology solutions. Mark has leveraged his knowledge of education and technology to effectively integrate learning technologies for the school districts in his home state to international projects literally spanning the globe. Having started as a secondary school educator specializing in Business and Technology Education in the early 1980s, he recognized that emergent technologies would inevitably impact the learning arena. Taking on the role of District Technology Officer for the school system, Svorinic crafted his vision into a reality by moving the schools into a technology rich environment long before the trend towards educational technology was affected across the United States. He continued to drive the trend in Arizona when he became the Director for Academic Technology Services in the Tempe Union High School district, a position he held through the technological watershed decade of the 1990s. After moving into the nonprofit sector and becoming the Assistant Director of a large nonprofit organization serving the technology needs of more than 300,000 Arizona students, Mark Svorinic joined the Cisco Learning Institute in 2000. At CLI, Mark took his years of experience as an educator on the secondary and university levels and combined them with an innate business sense and a talent for technology administration. Included in his portfolio was oversight of strategic and financial operations, business development, Institute identity, and fostering E-learning programs as well as overseeing Institute philanthropy. His role allowed him to plan for and drive emergent learning technologies and to bring them from the conceptual stages to actual field implementation with partners ranging from Cisco Systems Inc and its Cisco Networking Academy Program, the World Health Organization, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Jordanian Ministry of Education, individual school systems and others. Svorinic returned to the corporate sector managing the content development team for Pearson Digital Learning’s highly touted 9-12 online credit recovery system NovaNET. While guiding a gifted team of subject matter experts and instructional designers Mark led initiatives to integrate a new instructional design model into NovaNET course development and reduce course production time. Mark also recently served in the role of Chief Learning Officer for Pinnacle Education Inc where he focused his energies leading a team of directors, managers and educators in the delivery of online 9-12 instructional programs focusing on student engagement, learner success, student retention while developing teacher and student performance measurement systems. A respected professional on the topic of educational/instructional technologies, a specialist in operations and administration, a conceptualist with a gift for application and, most importantly, a mentor, Mark Svorinic continues on in his role of bringing technology to learning and sees it as one more intersecting point between the digital world, the teacher and learner on a journey he started more than two decades ago. Mark is currently the founder of Guru Associates LLC focused on assisting schools, nonprofits and non-governmental organizations to have greater impact by effectively integrating technology in the teaching and learning process.