Many adults still remember the taunts and pranks of school bullies from their childhood, and most have relegated those memories to the past. But school bullying, as well as the increasingly pervasive online variety, is still a destructive and far-reaching problem for children, affecting kids from all racial, socio-economic, and age groups. Parents and school administrators continue to struggle to address the phenomenon, and Education.com’s new Special Edition on Bullying at School and Online is the powerful resource that they have been looking for.

Created in partnership with the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) and guest editors Dr. Shelley Hymel and Dr. Susan Swearer, Co-Directors of the Bullying Research Network, and sponsored by Symantec, makers of Norton security software, Education.com’s Special Edition on Bullying is a premier web destination on bullying information and prevention based on research, not myth or outdated preconceptions. Containing over 30 original and cutting-edge reference articles, plus video clips, quizzes, community forums and parent checklists to prevent bullying, parents no longer need to search for information in the far corners of the web. From 10 Actions Parents Can Take to Help Reduce Bullying to a spotlight on the dangerous new phenomenon of cyberbullying, these new tools and resources are designed to help parents understand why bullying happens, and what they can do to prevent it.

As research into bullying uncovers more information about its causes and long-term effects, bullying is emerging as a top indicator of academic and emotional problems that can follow many children into adulthood. That’s why it’s important to stop bullying in its early stages, and why Education.com has created this authoritative new online resource. Physical and psychological bullying are not “just kids being kids,” and need not be the norm in our schools and online environments. By giving parents the tools they need to help end bullying, we hope to build stronger and more informed children and families.

Here at Education.com, we’re always looking for ways to give parents what they are searching for to help their children succeed in school. That’s why we’ve designed our new worksheets and printables portal. With this free new tool, parents can browse by grade and the subject area to find the perfect printable to support their child’s learning at home. Find worksheets from preschool through fifth grade, in subjects as diverse as math, reading, science, social studies, and games and coloring.

We’ve paired up with workbook publishers to share hundreds of pages on Education.com at no cost to our users, and we’ll be publishing hundreds more Education.com original worksheets in the weeks ahead. So stay posted, and get printing! Choose from hundreds of worksheets to keep learning going!

Today, the PTA Parent newsletter announced our School Reviews Contest and shared details on how local school PTAs can win $1000 by submitting reviews on their schools. 

Education.com is thrilled to have the PTA’s cooperation in promoting the School Reviews Contest!  The National PTA’s mission is to be a powerful voice for all children,  a relevant resource for families and communities, and a strong advocate for the education and well-being of every child.  Find your local PTA today and join the largest volunteer child advocacy association in the nation. Education.com attending the National PTA Conference in San Diego, CA last June where we had the opportunity to meet PTA members from across the nation and learn more about the organization’s needs and goals.  We hope to continue to work with the PTA in the future!

We are just one week into our School Reviews Contest and parents are already very motivated to share reviews on their children’s schools.  We have two fantastic examples of school communities working together to provide ample reviews on their schools, they must really want to win that $1000 prize for their school’s parent organization!

Parents from Ralph Waldo Emerson Elementary School in Fraser, MI have already submitted twenty informative reviews and counting!  Also, check out Fayette Co-Op Nursery School in Lexington, KY.  Their school community has provided eleven fabulous reviews so far!

Parents, let’s keep those reviews coming!  To learn more about the contest and review your child’s school, visit the SchoolFinder Review Contest today!

The big day is finally here…Happy Halloween!  Even before the big night, we’ve had a couple of memorable Halloween moments in our house.  Last weekend we had a Halloween party attended by 17 ghosts and goblins.  Here’s the parade…

For one of the games we played “Make your Mommy a Mummy” and armed each kid with a roll of toilet paper which ended up being quite hilarious!  

Oh and I also got a kick out of seeing Speed as Batman, my husband as his faithful sidekick Robin, and my father-in-law as Superman.  Three generations of super heroes under one roof!

3 generations of super heroes!

I think my favorite Halloween story though is actually my brother’s who, when he was 4, spent weeks getting excited to dress up as a ghost.  On the big night my mom got him dressed and let him look in the mirror and he got so scared that he refused to leave the house for trick-or-treating and went right to bed.

What are YOUR best and favorite Halloween moments (your own or your kids’).  I have five copies of the brand new Wiggles DVD called Sing a Song of Wiggles to give away.  (It’s a brand new  collection of your favorite foursome performing a nursery rhymes and original songs by the Wiggles - not even available in stores until November 7th).  We’ll send a copy of the DVD to five commenters chosen at random on November 3rd.  Make sure to put your email address on the comment form so I can contact you for shipping info if you win.

Wiggles DVD box

Today we are announcing an exciting opportunity for your school’s parent organization to win $1000 in the Education.com School Reviews Contest.

Did you know that your child’s school is profiled on Education.com?

Education.com’s SchoolFinder tool is designed to help parents research schools. We supply data such as test scores and student diversity statistics, but rely on parent reviews for the bigger, more personal picture. It’s easy- the top three schools with the most accepted reviews on December 20th will each win an award of $1000.  The prize will go directly to your school’s parent organization.

We hope you take advantage of this easy and fun way for you to promote your child’s school on Education.com and raise much-needed funds for your school’s parent organization. Find and review your child’s school and encourage your fellow parents to review today!

Last week, I introduced everyone to the concept of the Education.com expert panel, but I didn’t have a chance to go into detail about who is actually on our expert panel.  If you read the last post, you may be thinking, “Ok, so they have involved some so-called experts, but I still don’t know who is influencing the content on the site.” Fair enough. I’m going to share some background on five of our experts today along with their plans for bringing up-to-date research and information on topics you care about to the site over the course of the next year.  Without further adieu, let me begin:

The first expert I would like to introduce you to is Dr. Jeanne Funk.  Dr. Funk is a child clinical psychologist and Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Toledo in Ohio. As a researcher, she has been studying the impact of media violence, particularly violence in video and computer games, on children’s adjustment and behavior. Dr. Funk has traveled the world, talking with parents, researchers and video game makes on this topic, most recently visiting Saudi Arabia. Intrigued? So am I. At our Expert Panel Meeting, Dr. Funk committed to gathering articles from the folks who have been studying and thinking about kids and video games for years. Some of the topics she would like to tackle include stereotyping in video games and effects on kids, the effects of video games on a child’s brain, video game ratings explained, video games and teachers, and much more.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since the launch of our local school data and tools at the beginning of September, we’ve been working hard to improve the services and to respond to user suggestions. We’ve added a number of new features to the tools to increase performance and the user experience. Our Local Schools widget now allows users to show schools within a certain school district or show schools within an entire county, city, or particular zip code. The web service has similarly been enhanced and now includes multi-call and auto-expand radius functionality, and city-level information, such as average test scores and number of schools within a city.

With the launch of these new features, we thought it was a great time to reach out to a new set of users and used it as an opportunity to attend the California Association of REALTORS Expo conference in Long Beach, CA. The Expo gave us the opportunity to share the local school data and tools with agents, brokers, and other real estate sites at the largest real estate trade show in the state of California.  Finding the right neighborhood school is an integral part of the real estate buying process and access to accurate and up-to-date school information can deliver a lot of value for real estate agents and their clients.  Over 500 interested real estate professionals learned how to customize a Local Schools widget for their own site or blog by choosing the city, zip code, school district, or county they serve and customizing the color and size of the tool to fit seamlessly on their site.

REALTORS shared their enthusiasm for including school information directly on their website for their clients so easily.  It was clear that valuable information often comes at a high price, and the simple fact that the widget and school information are free was surprising and exciting to all we met. We also shared the school data web service with many in the real estate field. The web service gives developers access to the complete SchoolFinder database via an API key and was of interest to a variety of listing and search sites, such as our friends at eppraisal.com, as well as numerous regional brokerage firms.

We learned quite a bit from our second time exhibiting (the first time was at last year’s National PTA Conference in San Diego, CA).  Our lime green Education.com lunch bags were a huge hit with everyone at the conference and we should have brought twice as many to the expo!  Also, standing all day is exhausting… good thing there was a booth selling foot massagers not too far away! Lastly, it helps to have a friendly face in the booth approach the passersby, as Education.com’s Patrick proved to us- the ladies loved him!

We were thrilled with the response from the real estate community at the Expo and hope to continue our outreach and share our SchoolFinder tools across the country.  The Local Schools widget continues to evolve, the newly added feature to customize the widget for a school district or an entire county was a result of helpful feedback from users.  Also, a WordPress plugin has been implemented so that bloggers can insert the widget successfully in WordPress blogs.  We hope to continue to improve our tools, so please let us know what you think!  Send any comments to api-support@education.com.

At Whiz’s six year well visit I finally got brave enough to tell my pediatrician the truth.  I’ve ruined my two precious children.

Are they bright, well-mannered, happy, healthy and sparkly kids?  Well, yes.

But they’re also the two pickiest eaters on the planet.  And it’s starting to drive me insane - and to embarrass me.  When we go to friends’ houses for meals I have to explain that my kids won’t be partaking in the lovely meal they’ve prepared because they eat no meat, only raw fruits and vegetables, and single ingredient main course selections like pasta or cheese.  The good news is that the things they will eat are pretty good for them and net out to a relatively healthy diet.  The problem is that if something looks or smells the tiniest bit different than the items on their short list of approved foods, they both summarily turn up their noses, declare it ‘yucky’, and refuse to eat it (or anything that’s touched it of course).  And I have enabled their insanity by serving as a short-order-chef.  Not only do I almost always make two dinners (one for grown-ups and one for kids), but I also frequently make three dinners (one for grown-ups, one for Speed, one for Whiz).  RIDICULOUS right?!?! Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you are brand new to Eduation.com or you have been visiting us for a while, you have likely asked yourself, “Alright, who are these guys? Who is behind all this content?” You have probably discovered that the majority of our articles are from top-notch non-profit, government, and university organizations. In short, we have aggregated the best-of-the-best in one place. But how do we decide who is the “best”? As we have all learned from a plethora of recent lawsuits in advertising, determining who is number one in low fuel efficient vehicles, fewest dropped calls, and, yes, who is the best in high quality parenting and education content, can be a challenge.

Dr. Daniels and I do our best to review the content from our partners, but we are just a small team of two (albeit a very “mighty” team of two!). Thus, the smart founders of our company foresaw that we would need some help, reinforcements, if you will. Thus, on the seventh day…an expert panel was formed (cue ray of light!)… We gathered together twelve super brains in education and child development, to help advise the direction of the company and assure that we were “staying close to our roots.” For a quick list of our expert panel members, please see - http://www.education.com/about/experts/.

In true Education.com style, this isn’t some group of people who only serve a perfunctory role on the site, in addition to consulting throughout the year, we bring them together once a year to review the progress of the company and discuss future plans and directions. Our second annual meeting was held last week, October 9-10th in Palo Alto, California, and we couldn’t be more excited about conversations and plans that were made over the course of the two day conference.

One of the first priorities of the meeting involved discussing expert involvement in the Education.com online community. That’s right; our experts are actively involved in the Education.com community, answering questions on regular basis. We think this makes our online community pretty special because we have both parents AND experts patrolling the community, providing expert opinion and advice. Not all of us have immediate access to a pediatrician, psychologist, and/or teacher, so we’ve removed some of the leg-work and brought them all together in the Education.com community. For instance, Dr. Wayne Yankus, a community pediatrician in New Jersey, practicing for almost thirty years, is a regular on the community discussion boards. Dr. Yankus has been sharing his wisdom and expertise in the community on a daily basis for over a year now. If you want to talk with a straight-shooting pediatrician who has seen it all, Dr. Yankus is your guy.

We have plans to dramatically improve the usability of the current community section of the site and expert involvement will continue to be a prominent feature of the new community. At the meeting, we shared plans for the new tool (coming soon!) with our experts, and we discussed the process for experts to respond in a timely fashion. We are all very excited about the new tool and the value that we can bring to parents with our expert support team. Check back later this month for a peek at the new Education.com online community!

The second focus of the expert panel conference involved a special project initiated by each expert panel member that will focus on an important and pressing topic for parents. We’ll talk more about this later this week!