Our campaign has ended! Thanks to our 353 Funders for helping us make it happen! For those who still want to contribute, please contact us at info@lergo.org - we are looking for funds, volunteer developers and early content creators. Thank You!!

Описание и Подарки по Русски |  לתיאור ותשורות בעברית | وصف باللغة العربية 

What people are saying about LerGO:

In short - Why LerGO?

Kids everywhere have dreams and aspirations, and education is the key means for fulfilling them. But today, most kids need to complement public education with costly private lessons. This not only puts a big financial burden on their parents - it also increases the social gap. 

Today, all of us together, can change this - with LerGO. 

What can we do?

LerGO is a new non-profit educational venture aimed at providing free, animated & interactive online lessons for all children, anywhere, at any time. This will be made possible through LerGO's open source cloud platform, which will leverage the goodwill of the community, enabling contributors to easily create animated & interactive lessons. Kids will use these lessons to self-learn all school subjects, enjoyably and at their own pace. 

We need your help

We've worked really hard to get to this point. Now, we need your help: to fund the development of LerGO's platform, so that we can load it with our initial content and open it to the world. LerGO isn't just about offering high quality online lessons, and it's not just about providing an alternative to private lessons. LerGO is about giving the community tools to take education to the next level; it's about reducing the social gap and making the world a better place. LerGO is about helping our kids' dreams come true, and we need your help to make it happen. 

Who is behind LerGO?

My name is Nava Levy, I'm an expert on cloud and other technologies - prior to founding LerGO I was VP Cloud and before that, Head of Cloud Program, in two leading global high tech companies, cVidya and Amdocs. I'm also a mother of three and a volunteer tutor for disadvantaged kids. I founded LerGO because I believe the time is right for technology to step up and improve and democratize kids' education - making it accessible, fun and free for all kids, regardless of their socioeconomic background, language or learning style. 

Of-course it's not just me working on this - we could not have reached this point without LerGO's team of amazing contributors (to contact us, please email: info@lergo.org). LerGO's contributors are a diverse group of talented professionals, either as part time contributors or in advisory board roles. All of them, like me, are working on a voluntary basis. We believe that together, we have the required skills and cultural diversity to turn LerGO's vision into a reality:

• LerGO's contributors are experts from the domains of education, academy, technology and design and include professors and teachers, high tech executives, software hackers and designers, marketing & business professionals and entrepreneurs from the development and NGO community. 
  
• Their background includes top universities, leading global companies, specific experience as educators themselves, working in the EdTech domain (for kids and students in universities), working in the cloud & web domain and in online crowd sourcing companies like Wikipedia.  
  
• In addition to their diverse professional backgrounds, LerGO's contributors are also culturally diverse, coming from more than 6 countries across the globe and including Christians, Muslims and Jews (secular and religious), and together speaking more than 5 different languages
  
• Please see "Our Thanks" section for list of names of our awesome contributors!
  

What We Need & What You Get

We are currently raising $50,000. The raised money is not for my salary, but will go to fund primarily the development and hosting of the platform's first release. If we manage to raise the entire sum, we expect LerGO to start serving kids, teachers, and parents around the world as early as the summer of 2014.

Since we want LerGO to make an impact on all kids, anywhere, we are designing LerGO as a multi-lingual platform from day one.  This means we will be able to support lessons creation in most languages already in the first version, while the user Interface will be provided in English, Hebrew, Arabic and Russian. This already addresses three of the top ten most frequently used languages, addressing 150 million kids worldwide.

We believe LerGO has the potential to change kids’ education and we’re delighted that you believe in us and want to help. We want the great majority of our raised funds to go directly to the platform development, so we’re not offering fancy, expensive gifts. But that doesn't mean we haven't put a lot of thought in preparing nice perks for you (which we really hope you will like :-)).  It also doesn't mean you won’t get a return on your investment, because we plan to give you a great return through an alternative to costly private lessons (if you are  a parent) or by helping you save a lot of time at your work (if you are a teacher). Please refer to the Perks and FAQ sections for more details.

What we have done so far

We have been working very hard on LerGO for more than a year now, some of us as part time contributors or in advisory board roles, and me – full time. We are all working on a voluntary basis. The progress we have made so far spans across setting up a non-profit organisation, branding & marketing including name & logo design, educating the market and recruiting support from talented individuals and companies, creating a demo & POC of LerGO's platform and lessons,  wireframing, designing and coding the key screens of LerGO's platform and translating them to 4 languages (English, Hebrew, Arabic and Russian); defined 6 virtual studios sets for LerGO's lessons as well as selected & customized 6 animated characters (cute dog, robot, young man, young woman, spaceman, super-girl). We are also engaging in initial content creation and already created lesson examples in English Grammar & Spelling, Science, Algebra, Geometry and Biology, including receiving feedback also from kids - our "early students". In addition, we have developed the content for a unique spelling tutorial for teaching the 1,000 most frequently used words in Hebrew and began the process of replicating it to other languages.

Other Ways You Can Help

In addition to funding, we'd love your help getting the word out about LerGO and this campaign. We can't be everywhere and we don't know everyone who'll want to be involved—at least not yet—so we really need your help. Sharing on Facebook, Twitter, G+ or your favorite online or real-life networks of choice increases our chances of making a meaningful impact on kids' education, and making the world a better place.  

Needless to say, once the platform is ready, we hope you become an active contributor to LerGO, by creating lessons, adding questions and exercises, or editing, translating and tagging existing lessons.

If you are a software developer and want to get involved with LerGO, please contact us (info@lergo.org). You can also refer to the FAQ section below for more details.

How is LerGO different?

LerGO combines the best from two approaches to online learning:

1. The high usability of flash-based tutorials: animated, interactive and fun. A cute animated character will guide the students through the lesson step-by-step.
   
2. The openness, scalability and affordability of Open Educational Resources: adaptable, scaleable and free!

LerGO will combine these two approaches, into one powerful and orchestrated solution, which makes finding the right lesson at the quality as simple as Google search.  

What's an "orchestrated solution"?

Like Wikipedia, LerGO’s content will be created by a community of teachers, parents and other volunteers and will be orchestrated by editors and via users rating:

• Anyone can create a lesson: With LerGO, anyone can easily create an animated & interactive lesson. Putting together a lesson or adding a question can be as simple as writing an email. Whether you have 1 hour or just 5 minutes to spare, you can still contribute to LerGO. This makes LerGO an extremely scalable solution.
  
• Quality will be assured through orchestration: The content will be orchestrated with top-down regulations and editors who will edit, tag and certify content as well as bottom up users-rating.·
• Lessons can be easily found, by searching, logging into LerGO or receiving a link from a teacher or friend.
• A status report will be available for students, their teachers and parents after each lesson, and special badges will be awarded to both students and content creators

To Kids Anywhere

We want LerGO to make an impact on all kids, anywhere. So we are focusing on 3 principles:

1. Free, no ads, and open!  Lessons will be free, with no ads and open, so that anyone can edit, mix and share lessons.
   
2. Multilingual platform from day-1:  We are building LerGO as a multilingual platform so that lessons can be created in any of the supported language or easily translated and adapted to the relevant cultural context.
   
3. Different styles of learning: Many of us have different learning and teaching styles. By crowd-sourcing education, we get the additional benefit of enjoying these different teaching styles so that we can match the appropriate lesson to the student's learning style, making learning more effective and fun! 

FAQ

• How can I get involved? I want to help!
  
• What made you come up with this idea?
  
• Which solutions or people inspired you?
• What is the difference between LerGO and BrainPOP?
  
• What is the difference between LerGO and Khan Academy?
  
• What is the difference between LerGO and Wikipedia?
  
• If lessons are created by the community, how will quality be assured?
  
• Which languages will you initially support?  
  
• What about other languages? I can help you translate!
  
• I'm a teacher, how can LerGO help me and my students?
  
• Who are the people behind LerGO?
• When do you expect LerGO to open to the public? 
• What will the first release of LerGO include and what are its risks?
  
• After the public release of the first version LerGO's platform, how will you continue the development?
  
• You said you want LerGO to be Open Source, when do you think LerGO will place its software on GitHub or other repository as Open Source?
• Why is it important that LerGO was setup as a non-profit organisation?
  

• What is the Diagnostic Test that the VIP Pack includes?
• What are the Webinars I can choose from which are referred to in the Key Funders Pack?
  
• What are the estimated delivery dates for the perks?
• In the VIP Pack, what are the "animated characters of my choice" for the cool animated Thank-You Movie?
  
• I just want to contribute (I don't need the perks and/or prefer to be anonymous) - is it possible?

Our thanks

While there is still a lot of work ahead of us, we would like to take this opportunity to: thank you for supporting our campaign and spreading the word;  to the many fine people and companies who have helped us get this far; to our part time contributors, to our advisory board members, to all the kids, the early LerGO students, for their feedback and support; and to all the friends and family members for their continuous support.  We would not have made it this far, and could not have been ready for this crowd funding campaign without their generous help and continuous encouragement. Specifically, I would like to note below some of our awesome contributors and advisory board members (you guys rock!):

Maayan Cohen - Animator, Shira Paz-Greenberg - Designer @ Bruno-All New Media, Yariv Weinberg – Videographer @ Simanim, Malcolm Finn - Advocate; Liat Levy -  Development Consultant, ex P&G; Guy Mograby - UX/UI Software Developer & Blogger; Tanya Epstein - Co-founder Clarizen & Applango; Sagy Gulianka - Pricing Expert @ TMsight;   Dr. Hala Espanioly - VP @ Arab College of Education, Lewis Manne – audio, Zap Productions;  Dima Alkin - hi-tech executive; Sanad Atamna - Computer Programming Student; Sasha Gilenson - CEO & Founder of Evolven Software; Eyal Chen - VP Product & Technology @ WebsPlanet; Shuly Wandam - HRBP @ Unilever; Mira Cohen  - Teacher & Educator; Prof. Ariel Rubinstein - TAU & NYU; Alina Colton - Teacher & Educator; Gil Shai - Co-founder & COO CloudEndure; Prof. Dorit Ravid - School of Edu, TAU;  Dr. Dalia Fadila - QSchool, Pres. Technology College; Prof. David Passig - Futurist, Tech & Edu BGU;  Nadav Stark - Online Learning @ TAU; Tal Goldberg - Waze; Co-founder HumanClick; Tomer Ashur - former Chairman WikiMedia Israel; Shalom Passy - former COO of TimeToKnow & Senior Consultant; Dr. Zvi Paltiel - Educator & Physicist; Yishai Barak - Development Manager @ Siemens; Yoav Ben-Arie - Org. Learning Head @ BrancoWeiss; Gigi Levy - Angel investor, Mgmt board at Latet; Avner Algom, CEO of Israel Cloud Association; Dr. Aliza Belman Inbal - Int'l Development Director, TAU; Eran Wagner - General Partner, Gemini Israel Funds; Michael Couture - RVP, Amdocs Canadian Managed Services @ Amdocs; Haggi Hochberger - Director, Innovation Partnership Program @ Amdocs; Guy Brill - Former EVP Elbit & Mgmt Consultant; Giora Shaked - Founder & CEO of Hisense Medical; Zeev Ravid - Branding, former CEO Y&R Israel; Orit Yaron - SaaS Infra Architecture Specialist;  Ruti Arazi - Social Networks Expert; Moti Shatner - Founder BSharpC; Daniel Sirkin - Cinema & TV Dir. & Screenwriter; Lior Manor - Mind Engineering; Rabbi Yaron Levy - English Program Head, Otzem; Martin Buhr - Cloud Expert, HiTech Executive; Maysam Kanaan - Al Tufula; Yossi Ben-Shoshan - Director R&D @ Dell; Amnon Levav - Co-founder & Mng Dir @ SIT; Alexander Nelles - Head of Assisted Channels Capabilities @ Vodafone Germany

• Pumika Design - Pumika delivers engaging websites & applications with usability in mind and creativity at heart.
  
• Muvizu / Digimania - Muvizu is a fun and easy to use 3D application that lets anyone make animations.
• GoAnimate - GoAnimate enables businesses, schools, and individuals to make animated videos — quickly and easily.
  
• Pidoco - Pidoco is a web-based prototyping software for rapidly creating clickable wireframes and UI prototype.
  

In addition I wanted to thank UW MSR Summer Institute - for using their great logo to illustrate the concept of Crowdsourcing Education, for Tatoeba, Pixabay and Clker for leveraging their resources in LerGO's videos and lesson examples.

And last, but not least, I wanted to thank my dear husband, Dr. Jeffrey Levy, for his continuous encouragement and support (not to mention regular brainstorming sessions) through this exciting and sometimes nerve-racking journey.