We’re excited to announce that you now have yet another way to access reliable local school data. In addition to our SchoolFinder Application, our web service API, and customizable local school widgets, you can now access local school profiles through the recently published Local Market Explorer Wordpress plug-in!

The Local Market Explorer plug-in is another way that Education.com is seeking to break down information barriers that have made it difficult or expensive to access to comprehensive information about school performance. We launched our school syndication platform last fall and since that time, we’ve received a welcome response from our partners in the real estate and on-line media sectors. With detailed information on local schools from Education.com side by side with compelling category information from Zillow, Walkscore, Yelp, and Flickr at their fingertips, the Local Market Explorer makes it even easier for local websites to quickly incorporate information that not too long ago was all but inaccessible. It’s great to see.

So how does it work?

• Install
  • You can download the Local Market Explorer plugin here in the WordPress Plugin Directory.
• Activate and Customize
  • You’ll need separate API keys for all the APIs, except for Education.com. The links to the API signup pages are accessible via the settings menu of the plugin.
  • The Yelp, Walk Score, Market Activity, and About/Flickr modules can be turned on or off.
• Display
  • Once installed, point the URL in your browser location bar to one that matches the format of <http://www.yourblog.com/local/city/state>. For example, to load the module for Palo Alto, you’ll want to point your browser to or link to <http://www.yourblog.com/local/paloalto/ca>.

We’d like to extend special thanks to the developers who built the plug-in, Andrew Mattie and Jonathan Mabe, Drew at Zillow for leading the vision behind the plug-in, and our friends at Walkscore for their work in helping to create one of the easiest platforms for real estate professionals and local experts to provide detailed community information to their clients and visitors.

We’re looking forward to continuing to build innovation in the category.  Let us know how you like the most recent addition to our syndication platform and follow us on Twitter @schoolfinder for the latest and greatest updates.

The Local Schools widget has become a popular free tool for real estate sites and blogs to showcase local school information. We’ve received positive feedback on how easy the widget is to customize and install. The recent enhancements were made in order to further meet our user’s needs around free school data.

So what’s new and improved on the widget?

Now, you can showcase schools near an exact address. Simply input the street address and city or zip and the closest schools to the address will be shown in the widget, both in the map and list view. Now real estate sites can implement the widget to showcase nearby schools for specific properties.

Another great new feature is the ability to browse the widget map past the default location. For example, if a widget is created for the zip code 94603, the user can browse past the schools that lie within the zip code to see schools in surrounding zip codes or cities.

Lastly, our widget has an updated look and feel- we’ve updated the look but kept all of the customization options available, such as color choice, size options, and custom title so it can be visually integrated onto other sites.

Don’t worry, we’ve kept our other key features, such as the ability to create a widget for a zip, city, entire county, or a specific school district. That way you can create a widget for the exact area you serve.

Our local school data tools are free and popular with sites and blogs in a variety of industries, including real estate, local media, and school districts.  We hope to continue to see the popularity of the widget grow and are really excited to showcase the new and improved widget at the Real Estate Connect conference in San Francisco this week! Feel free to contact us with any questions on widget use at api-support@education.com.

On Friday, the Associated Press released a story, “Web sites help do the math to find a good school.” The article walked through a handful of sites, including Education.com, that allow parents to research and learn about local schools.

The article explains the variety of resources on our site, “Education.com hosts stories on everything from child development to bullying, but also features a detailed catalog of public and private schools across the U.S.”

The article also highlights the school information available in SchoolFinder, “Like the other sites, parents can find a trove of testing data, teacher information and a demographic overview of the school’s student population. Look here for other details, such as the percentage of students who were absent more than 21 days, classified as gifted, or speak limited English.”

We also thought it was great that one our school information partners using our free school data web service, Zillow.com, was commended for allowing their users access to this valuable information was researching a home. The article explains that Zillow nicely places “the school results in the context of a home buying decision.”

We hope parents check out SchoolFinder and let us know what they think!

We’re excited to add Dwellicious to the list of real estate partners to go live using our local schools web service to provide school information to its consumers. Dwellicious.com became publicly available on January 7. Since its launch, the site has received a number of accolades from the real estate community for the innovation and value-added features it makes available to home buyer, sellers, and agents. I’d like to add to the list in congratulating W&R Studios for creating an impressive new service.

As a home buyer and as a student of the on-line real estate industry, I appreciate the attention Dan Woolley and Greg Robertson have paid to the on-line home buying/selling research process. Dwellicious allows users to bookmark listings from 22 of the leading consumer real estate search sites, aggregates these listing in a single location, and provides a series of “cool tools” that give the home buyer or seller a powerful platform for making real estate decisions. Here is an example of bookmark created for a home for sale here in Redwood City, CA. Dwellicious’ “cool tools” aggregate information from a number of the leading free open API providers, including Zillow’s real estate and neighborhood resources, Google’s map API, Walk Score’s API, and of course, Education.com’s very own local schools web service. In aggregate, Dwellicious allows its users to create a complete profile for each of their bookmarked home listings that closely aligns with what users are looking to evaluate as they consider a listing or a particular neighborhood – valuation, comparable homes sales, the neighborhood, and local schools near that home. The site also offers Dwellicious Pro, which gives real estate agents and brokers the opportunity to create their own branded version of Dwellicious for use with their clients. The platform enables agents to engage in a more meaningful dialogue with their clients around the listing that interest them most and the ability to track their clients’ online activity through a series of management tools.

Congratulations again to Dan and Greg. I highly recommend the service for consumers looking to buy or sell a home, or for agents looking to take the client interaction to the next level. We’re psyched to see our school data adding value to another leading consumer real estate platform.

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.