SchoolFinder users can now find local resources from our partner, Care.com, while learning more about their child’s school.

Care.com is the leading online provider of trusted child caregivers and tutors.  The site makes the usually intimidating process of finding child care easy for parents by including extensive information on both babysitters and nannies, such as experience, availability, reviews from other parents, and personal introductions.  Also, Care.com’s extensive tutor profiles include tutor’s education, experience, and subject specialties.  Parents can browse all of the options in their area and find the best match for their family as a Care.com member.

Many parents come to SchoolFinder to learn about their child’s school or schools in their neighborhood or city. We hope that by providing local Care.com babysitters, nannies, tutors, and special needs providers within SchoolFinder will provide a valuable resource to our users.  We are thrilled to recommend the high quality of Care.com members to our Education.com community!

Get started today by finding your local school.

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.