Education and language learning is very important to all of us, and between the 28 employees, we speak a combined 22 languages! English, French, Spanish, German, Mandarin, Czech, Portuguese, Italian, Polish, Arabic... just to name a few. And our programmers “speak” more than 10 programming languages alone 😀.
Every year we get together for our Robotel Family Reunion to exchange ideas, celebrate our successes, reflect, and work on how we can improve. While not all of us at Robotel are language teachers, we all believe in what we do!
What brought us together is our passion for learning a foreign language and the importance of supporting and helping teachers in doing so.
We believe that teachers have a lasting impact on students while they prepare them for the future.
This is not an easy task! Lack of time, limited resources, increasing demands, and meeting individual student needs are well-known struggles in the teaching profession.
Teachers have to wear many different hats in the classroom in today’s world: parent, counselor, friend, psychologist, coach, role model, and the list goes on. It takes a lot to be a teacher and we understand these challenges.
That is why our SmartClass software is here to help you manage your students and time so that you can be all of these things while still doing what you love: teaching languages and immersing your students in foreign cultures.
Short story
It was the year 1984
Two friends were working on a robot project, somewhere in Canada. Étienne Bouchard and François Larochelle had the idea to develop point-of-sale robots that interacted with clients in retail stores.
Just shortly after they started their company (Robotel), the education system in Quebec started using personal computers in schools and they were in desperate need of a classroom management platform. Believing strongly in the importance of quality education, Étienne and François shifted their focus to develop their first Microselect solution.
Over the next couple of years, Robotel grew quickly, with many of the first employees still working for the company today! Subsidiaries in other regions, such as the US, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia were established so that educational institutions all over the world could benefit from the classroom management platforms developed.
In 1995
The very first version of our renowned SmartClass software was introduced to the world.
Since 2010
The focus of the company has been the support of language teachers, coaches, and instructors in their classrooms and students at home by allowing BYOD, enabling Wifi, providing both Android and iOS apps, supporting sign language, and launching the SCX (a service for school-to-school exercise sharing).
In 2018
Robotel also released its very first content.
Let’s Talk! English is a complete curriculum based on the CEFR framework for language teaching.
At that point, Robotel had grown not only within the technology and sales departments but also started to hire some of the teachers that had been using their SmartClass Software in their own classrooms.
These teachers became authors of Let’s Talk! English. That is why we pride ourselves on having designed a full digital English curriculum BY teachers FOR teachers.
Over 10,000 installations of our SmartClass have taken place in over 89 countries worldwide.
And we are not done yet! Constantly improving our software is very important to us. After the first “facelift," we are still working on adding features to both the student and teacher interfaces.
2020
We added a C-level book to our English curriculum series that is focused on writing skills while still giving plenty of speaking and listening opportunities to students.
Besides our English content, we have developed beginner through intermediate curricula for German and Spanish. Teachers will love these curricula since they will supplement and complement their current teaching materials with lots of individual speaking and listening practice while offering 50% of activities that are automatically graded.
Our Content Team has created a supplemental student resource book for our English curriculum.
Teachers can now learn everything they need to know about teaching with SmartClass by completing our SmartClass Academy.
2022-23
We launched administrator, teacher, and student-level reporting. The reporting feature enables teachers to effortlessly monitor and track students' progress across all language learning skill levels.
SmartClass is now integrated into Google Classroom.
Nexus Arabic has been launched using SmartClass to provide teachers with Pre-A1 and A1 curricula.
We introduced a specialized placement test to assess students' proficiency levels and assign them to the appropriate level within our comprehensive English curriculum.
We launched our official SmartClass by Robotel Account Portal (for cloud users), designed to provide teachers with one single login for teachers, all resources on hand, no bookmarking required anymore!
2024
We are releasing French curricula in early 2024!
We are committed to serving language teachers in their journey and offering more solutions and upgrades to SmartClass.
Étienne Bouchard
President | C.F.O
Yanick Demers
C.E.O
Melissa Arndt
Educational Consultant and Trainer
Ashraf Selim
Director Middle East | North Africa | Central Asia
Yves Martin
Director South Europe | Africa
David Liew
Director Asia Pacific
Candice O. Bland, PhD
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