LearnBoost launches free gradebook & lesson plan software to schools around the world

Just one year after releasing crowd-sourced translation features LearnBoost has announced full support for 12 languages: Arabic, Turkish, Italian, French, Spanish, Dutch, Vietnamese, Hindi, Romanian, Urdu, Portuguese and English.

"Language support is critical to our mission to transform education, in the U.S. as well as for schools around the world," said Rafael Corrales, CEO at LearnBoost. "Just take Spanish, for instance, which is spoken in over 20 countries; our Spanish release instantly allowed native speakers to leverage free and intuitive software. Now we're building upon that to bring our freemium software directly to even more schools."

With a mission to save schools up to 100% of their administrative software costs and a goal to promote communication among teachers, students and families, native language support will bring world-class technology to schools around the world that are charging ahead in the web 2.0 world.

On December 13, 2010, translation was opened to the broad LearnBoost community so that teachers, students, and parents around the world could take part in bringing free technology to their schools. The decision to allow the user community to translate LearnBoost's school software stemmed from early international adoption. Founder and Head of Product, Thianh Lu noted, "Over the past few months, we have been surprised and delighted to find that we are growing quickly overseas and have become quite popular in India. Our hope is that this feature encourages more folks to try out the best gradebook in the world."

Facebook is one of a few companies that have ever successfully pulled off a crowdsourced translation. In many ways, LearnBoost improved on Facebook's approach with translation of phrases, simplifying HTML tags, and leveraging contextual page information.

Over 2,000 LearnBoost users have already contributed phrases across a variety of languages. As languages are fully translated and vetted by community vote and an internal calibration tool, LearnBoost rolls out native language support. Ultimately, LearnBoost will move forward more languages to give an international user-base a customizable, personal experience in tracking, assessing, and planning for student achievement.

About LearnBoost: LearnBoost provides free administrative software for schools and classroom teachers. Track grades online, create and manage lesson plans, generate beautiful reports and analytics, share progress with parents and students, and much more while integrating with Google Apps. Available in +12 languages and used by schools in over 20 countries. You can learn more and visit LearnBoost at www.learnboost.com or www.facebook.com/learnboost and www.twitter.com/learnboost