Announcing our Free School Data Resources
It was with great pleasure that we publicly announced the availability of our local schools data tools yesterday. The SchoolFinder Tools give media outlets, websites, and bloggers access to comprehensive local school information about the Nation’s 125k K-12 schools.
While SchoolFinder is a great resource for parents, educators, and students to find a school and get comprehensive school data information, we realized early on that there is a broader opportunity here to disseminate local school information to an even larger audience than the million or so parents who visit our site each month. The SchoolFinder Tools are the first of their kind and enable websites to provide access to accurate and up-to-date school information to their users without paying hefty licensing fees or driving users directly away to another site.
There are currently two different ways to access the school information. Our Local School Widget allows developers and bloggers to create a customized widget in a matter of minutes and display information about local schools on their site. The enterprise-class school information web service gives developers access to the complete local schools database via an API key. We’ve been working with a few partners already and are excited to have Zillow and RealSeekr live with our school information on their site.
Local school information provides home buyers with key neighborhood insights and makes it easier for those buyers to evaluate which neighborhoods are right for them. Zillow is using our data on local schools to add value to their local homes listings and includes our resources in their free data resources directory. Check out the example for homes for sale in San Mateo, CA and Hillsdale High School. Realseekr has similarly added detailed school information to all their listings. Check out this house for sale in Grayslake, IL.
We are also very excited to see that our local school information resources being well received by the blogging community. Geek Estate, MyTechOpinion, and What’s your website done for you lately? have posted great reviews on the school information resources and the feedback we are generating from the exposure is invaluable to planning future local schools data enhancements. Many thanks to the bloggers that have begun to deploy the school information widget and web service on their own sites. The implementations on OC Real Estate Voice and The White Oaks Blog are great examples.
Please let us know what you think of these new local schools information tools. We’re really proud of what we’ve developed here but are looking forward to making improvements as folks like you road test them. You can send any comments to api-support@education.com.
September 12th, 2008 at 4:58 pm
Congrats on the launch — glad to be on board as a launch partner!
September 18th, 2008 at 5:38 am
Hello,
I am the founder of Sacramento Community Family Resources, and I want to thank you for your generous help in providing the school finder widget for our online resource center. We will be using it to assist families with pre-school age children to find the best school for their child to enroll into.
Victor Stark
September 18th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Victor, thanks for your comments. We look forward to seeing your implementation.
January 5th, 2009 at 12:14 pm
[...] 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 [...]