Description

ETEC members meet each Friday morning from 7:30am-8:30am. This meeting is open to all members and their guests.

We welcome our members and their guests to attend the ETEC meetings in person. It is the best way to connect, or re-connect, with friends, colleagues, and potential business opportunities. 

Join us at ETEC in person on Friday, April 12, to hear a very exciting presentation from Terry Thoren of Wonder Media Education, LLC.
Terry is currently CEO and President of Wonder Media Education and the former CEO of Klasky Csupo, Inc., the company that produced the first 65 episodes of the Simpsons, Rugrats, the Wild Thornberrys, Rocket Power and 4 animated movies for Paramount Pictures. 

Terry will talk about the power of animation to take complicated ideas and communicate them in a way that students can better understand.

Terry explains the 'Why' behind his motivation to use animation to bridge that gap:

Why Animation? Because animation knows no borders. It is a universal language that knows no race, religion, culture or creed. It is the most successful form of storytelling in the world. It is easily dubbed in any language and everywhere in the world people know the cinematic conventions of animation. All tweens and teens grew up with cartoons and they are easily attracted to animated characters before they respond to real actors.

When we produce animation, our goal is to create episodes that if you buried them in a time capsule and dug them up in 100 years the quality of the animation style and storytelling will stand the test of time.

His bio is below.

This meeting is open for both in-person and virtual attendees who are ETEC members and their guests.

No registration is necessary for in-person attendance.

Click here to register for the VIRTUAL meeting (note, this is a NEW link for the 2024 ETEC Friday morning  meetings):
https://tennessee.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZctdu2vqzwiHNMa_b5aisjx0xKW2eP4C6mY

For more information about ETEC’s weekly meetings, click here. 

Visit the Find Us page for the meeting location, address, and map.

Terry Thoren

CEO & President  
Wonder Media Education, LLC

Terry Thoren is the CEO of Wonder Media. He left Hollywood 15 years ago to launch a mission to use animated stories to prevent childhood trauma, help children and teens navigate out of trauma and model social emotional learning for children in grades pre-K to 12th grade. He is the former CEO of Klasky Csupo, Inc., the company that incubated the first 65 episodes of the Simpsons and produced Rugrats, the Wild Thornberrys, Rocket Power and more.

Animation knows no borders. It is a universal language that is immediately accessible to children, tweens, and teens worldwide. Animated characters help young people identify with the message in the story and apply it to their own lives.

This makes animation a powerful teaching and learning tool. We believe that animation is the most effective tool to model the skills needed to live happy, healthy, and successful lives. Wonder Media uses animation resources to make difficult subjects easy to talk about.

Wonder Media’s mission is to produce animated stories to connect with children and teens at risk with content that addresses hunger, emergency preparedness, social-emotional learning, critical thinking, autism, children with disabilities, the prevention of child sex abuse, the prevention of teen suicide, the eradication of sex trafficking, the perils that result from unprotected teenage sex, the dangers of substance abuse and providing guidance to children living in a home with an addicted adult.

The Oak Ridge School District is implementing Wonder Media Story Maker® a reading and writing program that allows students in grades 4-12 to create their own animation lessons in class, using more than 250,000 premade animation assets from Wonder Media's proprietary library. 

Teaching students to tell stories using animation is a powerful way to engage them inside the classroom in the same they are entertained outside the classroom. By producing their own animated lessons, students take ownership of collaborative projects that build soft skills and provide relevant experience in dozens of America’s booming technical fields. Young storytellers work together to develop, write, pre-visualize, voice record, and assemble original content, using a library of professional-quality character animations to bring their stories to life!

Wonder Media has produced animated lessons for the Child Rescue Service in Ukraine,  the Cook Center for Human Connection, the Global Institute for Habits of Mind, the Barbara Sinatra Children's Center Foundation, the Betty Ford Children's Center, the Hero in You Foundation, the Gabe Alvarado Foundation, the NALC Food Drive, The Boy Scouts of America, the Girl Scouts of America and the Wyland Water Foundation.

This CNN news piece focuses on the Rugrats animation studio and their success growing the company from a small commercial studio into the largest independent animation studio in the world.

This is his TEDx Talk that explains Wonder Media's mission and why they use animated stories to prevent childhood trauma.

Learn more at https://www.wonder.media