"We dream of recovering the healthy tradition that conceived education and school as an integral process, where the soccer ball wasn't an enemy of books. We dream of a school for today's students, who are neither worse nor better than what we used to be. For them, those born connected and in the middle of a network, is who we think of for today's classrooms", said Jose Maria del Corral, Global Director of Scholas, at the press conference held at Vatican’s Paulo VI room.

The new platform, Scholas.Social, seeks to unite the educational institutions from all creeds and cultures, as well as to build a space and culture of encounter. The site allows students and teachers to learn from one another and share the projects that they are working on which require an extra set of hands, whether it be funding or volunteers. Similarly, it allows these volunteers to easily identify those schools and projects that could best use their help.

Scholas was born a year ago in this same city, when Pope Francis entrusted Scholas to build a network of schools that could collectively change the way students learn. The initiative is modeled after two projects he ran as Archbishop of Buenos Aires and which are dear to his heart: Escuela de Vecinos (Neighbor Schools) and Escuelas Hermanas (Sister Schools). Both projects focus on sharing the concerns and problems of students in richer and poorer neighborhoods and looking for solutions together, thus promoting participation and enabling change.

Taking this idea global required a robust, yet easy-to-use, platform. To this end, three technological companies joined Scholas in this endeavor by donating their work: the software development company Globant devised the website, Line64 was responsible for the programming, and Google integrated its educational tools Google Apps for Education. Representatives of these companies were also present at the event: Enrique Palmeyro, Global Director of Scholas; Martin Umaran, from Globant; Santiago Carmuega, representing Line64; and Adriana Norena from Google SpLatam.

Scholas.Social combines features from social and collaborative platforms, where users can upload projects and are encouraged to participate in other initiatives by promoting them or donating knowledge, time, or materials. This is done through different "gamification" strategies, a worldwide trend that encourages the use of game mechanics in a non-game context to promote user engagement. In a second stage of the project, Scholas and its partners will work on bringing more tools and functionalities to the site to continue building the classroom of the future.