Announcing: School Reviews

Good day to all. My name is Gabriel Mercado and I'm the admin of Mom Exchange. Today I would like to introduce a new feature called School Reviews (beta).

School Reviews is a list of all schools (NCR at the moment), divided by City or Municipality. Find your school on this page, give it from 1 to 5 stars, and leave a comment. It's that simple.

And now I'll go into a little bit as to the history and rationale for this new feature:

1. The Traditional Vs. Progressive Post, primarily, was my main motivation. It was written last Mar. 20, 2007, and now a full two years later is still growing with 630+ comments and 9,700 views not including the time when I had to reset the counter mid last year when I updated the site.

   There are two questions most often asked here, and they are a.) What do you guys think of [name of school]?, and b.) Which school can you recommend in [some area]? I think School Reviews will serve as an appropriate solution.

2. Secondarily but no less important is how happy I am at the quality of comments we regularly receive in this site. I am in the website consulting business and more often than not, people tell me how scared they are of negative comments and how this may affect the quality of content on their site. MomEx however, has proven a theory I've always harbored: That if you provide a good virtual environment focused on its goal, people will act responsibly. So far, it's worked (crossing my fingers). I'm not saying it always will, but for the most part we (Jen and I) have hardly had reason to delete anything yet, other than the occasional obvious spam, troller or subtle sales - pitch. In other words, I am confident that if I do the School Reviews right, people will respond with equal enthusiasm (which is probably why it took me so long).

3. And finally, not too far from previous point, is that I think Pinoys Deserve Better. Take this comment for example, from a Dr. Acedera, or this cry for help from cHELLE. They took time and effort to write about their experiences, and therefore deserve to be read. Unfortunately not only was the Trad. vs. Prog. post not the venue for this (they were off-topic), but being a very busy blog post their comments are sure to be buried, and consequently forgotten, in the near future. School Reviews hopes to contain opinions on a particular school on-topic, by providing a 'page' per school. That way, you can go ahead and talk well (or low) about a particular school, and it'd still be ok because it's on - topic, and people can find it easier.

   I haven't researched much as to who else does this locally, but even if there are others, I'm glad to join MomEx into the fray because I really feel Pinoy parents deserve a better way to learn about where their kids go to school.

So there you go. If you are a parent with children enrolled in any school within the National Capital Region, please rate and leave a comment about the school your child is enrolled in. I managed to import 1,560+ schools in the NCR region for this beta period. Once everything works out smoothly, and / or pending suggestions from you, dear MomEx users, I'll go ahead and add the rest of the schools nationwide, including public schools.

Contact email me or leave a message below.