Boosting Sales Is No Game to LeapFrog

The division will continue to market and support its core products, such as: the LeapTrack system, The Literacy Center, Language First!, the Interactive Library and key pre-kindergarten programs, as well as other new product lines.

The LeapTrack system, a tool for standards-based assessment and instruction, will be converted to an online tool and will also be launched in 2008.

In addition, the division will strengthen its catalog and Web sales efforts under the new plan.

Back on Course

Despite LeapFrog SchoolHouse’s dip in sales, the division has remained an innovator in educational publishing. Today, the company’s multisensory products reach students in more than 100,000 classrooms across the country, with more than 200 interactive-book products and 500 skill cards representing more than 6,500 pages of educational content. LeapFrog’s proprietary Learning Tools are designed to enable teachers to personalize student instruction, assess and monitor student progress relative to state and national standards, and integrate technology into classroom learning.

This summer, LeapFrog SchoolHouse won the Association of Educational Publishers’ (AEP) 2007 Golden Lamp Award for Books for its “English Picture Dictionary for Spanish Speakers.”

According to Charlene Gaynor, executive director of the AEP, the Golden Lamp Awards are judged by highly experienced publishing and educational professionals.

“It is a rigorous process that requires their unanimous consensus,” she says. “We think of the Golden Lamp as the industry equivalent of the ‘Best Picture’ Oscar. Winning it means the product has set the industry bar for quality and innovation.”

Gaynor says that the “English Picture Dictionary for Spanish Speakers” spurred a bit of discussion among the judges about just what constitutes a book these days.

“Their consensus was that the winner really redefined the traditional meaning of a reference book by marrying the intrinsic value of print with the interactivity of digital media,” she says. “LeapFrog SchoolHouse has produced successful products for the school market because they’ve focused on solid instructional and learning methods first, and cool technology second. There is a lesson in that for publishers of other consumer products and publications with ‘cross-over’ potential.”