Education City

Tim McEwen, Archipelago Learning's chief executive officer, stated, "We are delighted to be acquiring a company with highly complementary products that fit perfectly with our strategy of delivering high-impact low cost content-rich online tools to improve student learning. Similar to Study Island, EducationCity maps to standards, combines rigorous content and interactive animations, fun games, and motivational rewards to drive academic success in a fun and engagement manner. Unlike Study Island, EducationCity core classroom and individualized instruction is geared toward the initial teaching phases of academic content. EducationCity helps students learn basic skills and concepts while Study Island helps assess, reinforce and master this knowledge. When used in conjunction with one another, EducationCity and Study Island provide a powerful comprehensive teaching and reinforcement solution to maximizing student learning and teacher performance." McEwen continued, "EducationCity's strong penetration in the UK with 8,200 current schools and its ability to expand to other English speaking countries provides the start of a global platform for Archipelago Learning to begin exploring international expansion opportunities. In the U.S., EducationCity has grown to over 4,800 schools in less than three years and has the opportunity for significant growth as we seek to expand the number of schools and sell new products to existing schools. By combining EducationCity products with Study Island's, we will have two of the leading K-12 online education products in the U.S. market; thereby strengthening our product offering and bolstering our positioning within our core K-12 online education market."