About Us

School Loop Team | Board of Directors 

School Loop is a Burlingame, CA-based corporation. Mark Gross, the CEO and founder, is a high-school teacher and a former publisher and Internet executive. Tom Burns, CTO and co-founder, is the engineering brains behind the application. Dede Tisone, Director of Support and co-founder, is a nationally certified Art teacher and was Gross's mentor in a new teacher program run. 

School Loop was founded in 2004 after a year trial-run in Gross's classroom. Gross financed the company through the closing of a $1.725m round of angel financing in Jan 2006.

Mark Gross, CEO/ Founder. Mark Gross had publishing and Internet development career before becoming a teacher. He became a Vice-President of Gralla Publications when he was 29, and went on to become director of Internet Strategy at Cowles Media Company, then publishers of the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Gross moved to California with his wife and two daughters in 1998 to help launch Business 2.0 magazine. He went on to become president of FutureNet, the Internet arm Future Publishing, a leading European publisher of computer and games magazines.

Gross left publishing in 1999, a year after Future’s spectacular IPO. He went back to college and earned his teaching credential, and in 2002, became a social studies teacher at Evergreen Valley High School in San Jose. Gross was an innovative and popular teacher, and won the prestigious Internet Innovator Award from National Semiconductor at the end of his first year. His Outside My Window project was finalist in the U.S. State Department’s “Doors to Diplomacy” contest as well.

His experiences in the classroom and in a Small Learning Community led him to develop School Loop. Gross graduated from Franklin and Marshall College and lives in California.

Tom Burns, CTO/Co-Founder. Tom Burns is not your typical CTO. A brilliant engineer, Burns co-founded Dolphin Controllers in 1987 and developed an industrial welding robot based on the Macintosh. He went on to become VP of Development in 1992 for AIM21, a system that enabled ad agencies and consumer products companies to view their advertising (print, video & audio) and all information related to the ads. The system was used by major ad agencies like JWT, FCB, Y&R, Saatchi & Saatchi, and consumer product companies like Pillsbury and Colgate. Reuters bought the company in 1996.

Burns went on to become CEO and co-founder of jGuru, the most popular independent community for Java developers. As CEO, Burns raised $6 million and sold $5 million in training, consulting & advertising. jGuru was sold to Jupiter Media in 2005.

Burns graduated from Purdue University with a degree in Computer & Electrical Engineering. He is single and lives in San Francisco.  Read about Tom's work on School Loop in: Web Application Internationalization and Localization in Action. An academic paper by Terence Parr, University of San Francisco.

Dede Tisone, Director of Support/Co-founder. Dede Tisone has been a public school art teacher and specialist for more than twenty years. She earned her master’s degree in art at San Francisco State University and achieved National Board Certification in the category of Early Adolescence through Young Adulthood Art in 1996. She left the classroom to become the Director of the California Arts Project at San Jose State University, where she also taught methods classes and supervised teacher candidates.

She received Fulbright-Hays fellowships to both China and India and has traveled extensively throughout the world leading arts workshops in California and abroad. In 2004 she served on the panel that developed the standards and the subject matter examination for the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing (CCTC).

Besides being School Loop’s master-teacher-in-residence, Dede is well-known to School Loop members as the heart and soul of customer service, and the teacher wagging her finger admonishing people to be polite when they publish on School Loop.