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.

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.

Education.com is excited to announce a new partnership with PrepSportswear.com, a leading provider of custom school and team apparel.  School apparel and gear is now easy to find, customize, and afford.  SchoolFinder school profiles include individual school gear stores, where you can customize your school’s t-shirts, sweatshirts, jerseys, or any other spirit gear.  Put your name on the item, include your school mascot, and make it your own! I can’t wait to get a new Stevenson Patriots sweatshirt from my old high school… or get my niece excited about her new school with some school gear of her own.

Head back to school with spirit! Just in time for back to school savings, find your school and get your gear today!

Learn all about green schools- find ways to help your school go green and browse LEED certified schools in your state.

Green Schools

Students, parents and teachers are working together to promote green schools.  Recycling programs, bus transportation, and water efficiency are just a few of the many ways schools save energy and reduce waste.  Also, environmental education programs raise students’ awareness on how they can impact their environment. Learn about five easy ways to green your school. 

Although many schools promote green programs and activities, some schools are actually ceritified as green schools.  This means they have been certified by the U.S. Green Builing Council as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified.  Find LEED certified green schools near you.  The LEED for Schools Rating System is specific to the design and construction of K-12 schools and buildings, addressing such things as energy efficiency, water conservation and mold prevention.  

Green School Review Prize

How green is your school?  Find your school with our SchoolFinder tool and tell others about your green school!  Writing a ”green” review gives you a chance to win a beautiful hard cover copy of Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World.  Learn more.

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’ve received great feedback about our local school data and tools, but also some questions on how real estate professionals can access them. With this video guide, learn about our free school info and how to make a local schools widget! Walk through the five steps of creating a local schools widget for your site or blog and see sample widget implementations.

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.

A big congratulations to the winners of the School Reviews Contest!  All three schools will win a $1000 donation to the school parent organization.  We were thrilled with the participation in our contest, over 600 schools were reviewed!  Alongside local school data and information, parent reviews are a great way to get a sense of a school’s culture and environment and help with school decisions.  A big thank you to all of our participants!  Here are the contest results!

In 1st place with 91 reviews!
Gifford Elementary School in Racine, WI

In 2nd place with 37 reviews!
Ralph Waldo Emerson Elementary School in Fraser, MI

In 3rd place with 26 reviews!
Judith A. Resnik Community Learning Center in Akron, OH

Wondering what’s new with the Local Schools widget? It is such an easy way to show local school information directly on your site or blog, many real estate professionals have implemented widgets on their sites. 

Local School widgets have been created in all sizes and colors for cities and counties across the country.  From adding the ability for users to see schools in different cities, to incorporating local school information alongside other community features, realtors have been creatively integrating widgets onto their sites. Real estate bloggers have also jumped on the chance to have school information on their blog for free.  The local school information WordPress plugin is now available so bloggers can incorporate the widget easily.

Another great development is that school districts have put widgets up for parents to see school information directly on their sites.  With no development cost,  school districts can show school information to parents and students in minutes.