Fair Trade Online Spanish Tutoring Company Recognized for Business Leadership and Innovation
Beaverton, OR (PRWEB) March 22, 2006 — Speak Shop, http://www.speakshop.com, a pioneer in online Spanish tutoring via webcam, announced today that it has been selected to receive the 2006 InnoTech Innovation Award.
Presented by the InnoTech Conference in Oregon, the InnoTech Innovation Awards spotlight and reward four Oregon companies for innovative development of a product or service. Clay Cooper, Co-Founder and CEO, will be speaking at the conference about applying leadership and innovation to successfully grow a company. As a company that measures both a financial and social bottom line, Speak Shop delivers a revolutionary Spanish education service while creating better job opportunities for educators in developing countries.
“We are excited and grateful for InnoTech’s recognition of our growing business,” said Mr. Cooper. “Speak Shop’s unique cross-cultural approach to Spanish tutoring came from my own experience as a struggling Spanish student. I was finally able to learn by taking immersion tutoring in Guatemala. It is incredibly rewarding to make the same type of instruction available to people all over the world through our service.”
Through Speak Shop’s website, people anywhere in the world can take one-on-one Spanish lessons with pre-screened Spanish tutors in Guatemala via webcam. A unique aspect of Speak Shop’s business is that tutors learn to work as business owners, managing their own rates and hours. Tutors receive training and support from Speak Shop to increase their tech skills and help them become entrepreneurial.
To make its services as widely available as possible, Speak Shop uses open source software and will soon be launching new learning tools developed on the Moodle education platform.
Speak Shop was awarded “Best Social Return on Investment” in the 2005 Social and Environmental Technologies competition.
About Speak Shop
Speak Shop was founded in 2004 to increase access to cross-cultural foreign language education and to generate economic opportunity for people in Latin America. People around the world use Speak Shop to take live Spanish lessons online while supporting international economic development. For more details on Speak Shop visit http://www.speakshop.com.
