Facebook has spent the last year or so working with a group of public schools to develop software that can help schools better monitor the progression of their students, and now that the trial phase is over, the company is ready to bring the software to schools across the United States. The software itself is actually pretty neat, but developing it was the easy part, now Facebook is going to have to find away to expand it into more schools, but I’m sure the fact that it’s entirely free will help with that expansion. 

Facebook, which transformed communication with its social networking service, now wants to make a similar impact on education. The Silicon Valley company announced on Thursday that it was working with a local charter school network, Summit Public Schools, to develop software that schools can use to help children learn at their own pace. The project has been championed by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, and one of his top lieutenants, Chris Cox. “We’ve seen that there’s an opportunity to help apply our skills to the future of education, and we all wanted to find a way to help make an impact by doing what we do best — building software,” Mr. Cox wrote in a blog post announcing the initiative. Eight Facebook employees have been assigned full time to work on the project, which began quietly last year after Summit’s chief executive, Diane Tavenner, asked Mr. Zuckerberg for help improving the tools developed by Summit’s lone software engineer.