Noodle Brings Organized Search to Education Choices
As most of you know, I have a teenage son. He is a junior and he is in stage one of planning for his college applications. His “where do I want to go to school list” is long and spread out over the country. Then he sprung on us last week that he really wants to be an exchange student and live abroad for a semester next year. Yikes! But more power to him! I found out that there is a brand new site that was just launched that is going to be perfect for us to use for his college search! It is called Noodle.org and it is an online life-long education search engine. Sounds like just what we need.
Noodle is a fabulous place to go when you are looking for data and information on schools for K-12, college and graduate levels. It offers resources for learning materials, studying abroad, and even tutoring. It’s is a great tool! Check this out:
Did you know:
* Over 3 billion searches related to learning and education take place monthly, but research shows that these searches frequently end with more questions than answers
* One-third of all students transfer colleges at least once before a degree, as well as high dropout rates, suggests that students are making costly and time consuming mistakes with their choices
Now there is Help!
* Noodle.org addresses this need for an effective internet resource to search and recommend schools, programs, providers and content for education
* It features data on over 130,000 schools and hundreds of thousands of education providers
* Noodle.org offers content from the most credible sources, including federal and state education departments and agencies, LinkedIn, Forbes, Newsweek, YouTube Education, and US News & World Report
* Users can select from over 350,000 interactive learning materials covering an expansive range of subjects, compiled from noteworthy sources such as National Geographic, The Smithsonian, Khan Academy and BigThink
* With over 120,000 K-12 schools, 2,900 4-year colleges, 5,000 graduate programs, 135 study abroad programs and 80,000 tutoring listings, Noodle.org has the largest compilation of education resources found anywhere on the web
* Once users narrow their search selection and want to engage with friends, family and others who have shared experiences, Noodle.org enables them to share their findings from the site via Facebook and Twitter, and save their results for easy access
I went to the site and registered with my name and email address and I was in. It starts you off with a simple Get Started. You can choose what you are looking for…. college search, test prep, learning materials search, etc. So I started with the college search. It asks for the SAT scores or you can go through without them and it just uses a default score. It then takes you through a series of questions about your likes and dislikes and from there it recommends schools.
What is neat is that there is a drag and drop feature that lets you take the school you are interested in and allows you to compare them with other schools. That is a huge time saver instead of trying to figure out which one is the best fit. Then when you click on the link of the school there is a HUGE amount of information about the school including fees, culture, admissions info, enrollment numbers, what they look at to make their decision and more. I am truly thrilled about this site!
Also on Noodle.org is a ton of reference information and general articles relating to eduction that you may be interested in. Such as Top 10 Most Interesting College Courses by Michael Maselli, Top 10 U.S. Business School Ranking for 2013 by Marcelina Hardy and How to Survive a Bad SAT Score by College Prowler. This site is a fabulous tool!
My son came home while I was writing this and I showed him the site and he was excited. The search parameters I put in brought up several of his choices already but also included many that we had not thought of. This is going to be a lifesaver and a huge time saver. I have only scratched the surface of all of the information that is available in here too. I love the features for tutoring, guidance counseling and learning materials too.
If you have school age children or grandchildren you have to check out the new eduction search site. This is a great site that will change the way you look for information relating to education on the internet forever.
