Adding Great LOCAL education information to your blog or website
Yesterday on MyTechOpinion NikNik wrote about a great resource for School data and widgets: Schooling Your Clients From Your Real Estate Blog. I liked what I saw so much I created (in less than 2 minutes) the widget you see here. This is provided free from Education.com, and if you want to get right to creating one of your own, click here. They also offer a web service that grants you access to all the great data which may be displayed in your own application (heavy coding required). The list of information they provide is below. Please note that the interface allows for Parent Ratings and Reviews as well. This sort of crowd sourcing will make the offering very compelling over time. The only issue I can see here is that if you use the widget, and folks click on a school for more info, it opens another browser window, leaving your website behind the new window. This could be avoided if one used the webservice, but the development costs to do so might be prohibitive when compared to the risk of loosing eyeballs on your website. This is in Beta right now, so if you use it beware that it may be spotty at times. I have seen map loads take wicked long here.
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Steve, thanks very much for the post and the thorough review. We appreciate your comments!
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Seann,
I am working on a small but unique real estate site for a client, and it might be interesting to look at the web service and see how that can be tied into the current property listing mapping structures (as well as the non-mapping interface).
If we decide to invest the additional time it might be a good experiment which we could report on here. I'll shoot you an email if we move that direction.
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Nice little tool, but limited. I'm not finding any schools listed for the district I mainly serve. But it is in Beta and will probably improve over time. I've already added the widget to one page on my site. Thanks for sharing.
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Sam,
It looks like Seann Birkelund of Education.com is watching here. If he has not contacted you, I would suggest you shoot them some feedback and start a conversation about Austin area schools and the data they have.
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Sam, thanks for checking out the widget. What's the district and zip that you cover? We'll look in to it.
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I think it is easier to "count" if there's a different color for different school levels, like red for college and blue for high school.
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Did you notice the check boxes at the bottom of the map to select the "type" of school? Additionally that same checkbox "filter" is found at the bottom of the text list.
I am not saying that this is tool can not be improved upon, but what you asked for is there already.
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This widget tool. Thanks for sharing this.
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