March 28, 2012

GreatSchools Goes Mobile

Researching schools? There's an app for that.

Few things are as stressful as choosing a school for your child. Outside of smaller communities, gone are the days when parents merely took their kids to the nearest public school, never giving the choice a second thought. Elsewhere, charter schools, magnet schools, and a wide range of school choices have transformed this simple act into a complicated evaluation in which engaged parents weigh a host of factors, including a child’s personality, their educational philosophy, distance from home, student diversity and costs (if private schools are in the mix).

Here’s something that might help.

The folks at GreatSchools have come up with a free app for iPhone or iPad called the GreatSchools Finder. Search for schools by zip code or city or rely on your GPS location, narrow your choices by grade level, and use the Google map to get your bearings and explore nearby schools. Surface level information includes the school’s name, address, and a GreatSchools ranking on a scale of one to ten. Go deeper to read parent reviews of the school, get test scores, and other essential stats for the district. The app and all of the rich content from GreatSchools is particularly handy if you’re moving to a new area.

The GreatSchools Finder relies on a database of more than 200,000 U.S. public and private schools, and more than 800,000 parent reviews. Don’t have an iPhone or an iPad? All of that same great data is available on your desktop computer, too.






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