In this February, I did profiled CollegeFinder, a project launched by GlobalScholar that enabled users to find college information at their fingertips, and now they’re officially releases the public beta of SchoolFinder. SchoolFinder is different from CollegeFinder, where you can only find the K-12 school information. Most of the time, I read research reports that stated most parents are concerned with education, but they too often were unable or unwilling to spend sufficient time with their children. At least now, they should do one thing, i.e. to find and compare good schools via SchoolFinder.

On SchoolFinder, you’ll get to know whether a school you’ve chosen for your kids is listed in the top 100, albeit that a good school can help to stimulate a child’s learning curiosity, but other factors such as location, school district are some very important factors to consider when sending a child to the school, and SchoolFinder can provide all these information. In particular, SchoolFinder was designed as a site for parents to research, discuss and compare schools, which at this moment there are 132,162 schools got listed on this site. Parents can search public, private, charter schools via here, if they like a particular school, more in-depth information such as grade levels offered, students demographics, number of students or full-time teachers, student-to-teacher ratio, disadvantaged student enrollment, minority enrollment can be found on each of the school’s profile. Although some parents were insensitive to the aforesaid information of a school, but they definitely love to know the test scores when compare to the State averages. Additionally, the ratings might also influence their school selection decisions, if the overall ratings for a particular school is low, if you’re a parent, will you send your kids to this school?

Similarly to CollegeFinder, this SchoolFinder has also prepared a virtual map that show the exact location of a particular school. All those virtual maps were powered by Microsoft’s technology, and they are great features if parents were uncertain with the locations of the schools. Furthermore, to encourage parents in the involvement of this site, SchoolFinder also developed the discussion forums where general or specific topics are being discussed on this forum.

A tutoring platform that I profiled in last November called infiLearn, now changed name to GlobalScholar has raised $27 million in round B. As a Program Coordinator worked in the postgraduate sector, I always believed that Web 2.0 and education are two major trends in technology that are inextricably linked. I came across a lot of e-program specifically targeting the working adult, but the emerge of a technology platform such as GlobalScholar for the young students reflect that the Internet revolution in educational market are in place.

As widespread on the Web, GlobalScholar has raised $27 million in a new round and also purchased a Colorado-based Excelsior Software, which provides a range of education solutions software suites, featuring several set of student assessment technologies. However, financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. The acquisition was announced as part of a venture capital round for GlobalScholar. Existing investors include Knowledge Universe Education and Ignition Partners, with several investors that have pumped into infiLearn $15.5 million in previous round, that makes the total amount of venture funding raised by infiLearn (now GlobalScholar) to a whopping $42.5 million.

From the infiLearn beta site to GlobalScholar, many new content have been added to the site. The columns such as Popular Teachers, Featured Classes, SAT Tutoring, College Finder and the lightweight mashup with Microsoft’s Virtual Earth in finding colleges’ location such as MIT’s map showed that this site has been a purely labor of love for the GlobalScholar team, not barely on the money. As educational markets continue to evolve, many new frontiers such as GlobalScholar will have an impact beyond their initial drafted markets. Regardless how much its acceptance by the public, I believed GlobalScholar will play an increasing role in shaping the innovation surrounding educational market.

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