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.