foolfillment: the blog

I wrote a wee while ago about having made an overlay for Google Earth of the schools I could have been placed in. Ewan picked up on it and the possibility for filling it up with all of the schools from an LTS database. At the time I realised I hadn’t made the file available but never got round to doing it.

Today it finally made it to the top of my list, so should you feel like populating it with some more then feel free to do so. I don’t know of a CVS system for these so either let me know of one, or leave a comment here saying if you’ve made any changes and where the new version is hosted and I’ll update this post.

Without further ado: (some) Scottish Secondary Schools. Currently it only has the location for secondaries in East Lothian, Scottish Borders, Perth and Kinross, Moray, and Highland. I haven’t even added in the addresses or contact details so there is a lot of work that could be done to it.

Update: New version with East Ayrshire secondaries included. I’ve also made it available on the Google Earth Community.
Scottish Schools 20/06/2007 (kmz – compressed version of the kml)

I’m not sure how but this has passed completely under my radar until today. BarCampScotland is happening in Edinburgh tomorrow, with an unsocial meet up at the Edinburgh rugby match tonight. I don’t think I can make it to either parts unfortunately, the timings just don’t match up with some other things I have to do this weekend.

It’s a real shame as there are a lot of people there who I’d like to meet and hear present, including Duncan Smeed who can justifiably claim to be my blogfather but I can look forward to seeing all the photos and slides appearing over the next few days.

[tags]barcampscotland[/tags]

19/11/2006 from Stuart Hunter’s photostream.

What’s your favourite thing to do in snow?*
I like walking, although you can’t tell it from this photo.
I went up The Cobbler yesterday (incredibly my 5th attempt – all others having been thwarted by various things from weather to unfit companions) in thick mist, over deep snow, with a strong desire to get up and down before the rain/snow started to fall. Lovely!
*As Jonsie has been asking recently

I’ve written about this topic before, next year after I have graduated I get a job in a scottish school for one year as part of the NQT induction scheme, where I go is a bit up in the air.

There is a system where I pick my 5 preferred councils and I am hopefully placed in one of them and then there may be some element of choice of which school within the council I go to. The other option is the Preference Waiver Scheme where I could be placed anywhere in Scotland with the bonus of £6k (less tax).

On Friday there was a fayre held at uni for all the people who will be going into the induction scheme next year with most of the councils attending. Until recently I was tempted to go for the preference waiver scheme because £4.5K sounds like a fair whack when you’re a student, but I don’t know if I like the idea of the desicision being completely out of my hands and £4.5K isn’t really that much when weighed against the possible costs of starting out in a place I don’t want to be.

Needless to say this has been on my mind a lot over the weekend but I am no closer to being able to make a final decision yet – there are too many factors here to consider so I have just ruled out a lot of places simply on gut feeling because that’s as good a way as any without going and visiting them all. My main prefererence is somewhere nice and quiet that has a good reputation for it’s induction scheme. So far, based purely on my idea about the place itself and not education, I have narrowed 32 councils down to these ones in no particular order.

• East Lothian
• Borders
• Highlands
• Dumfries and Galloway
• Argyll and Bute
• Perth and Kinross
• Moray

(more…)

The Herald reports today on a new course offered at Intermediate 1 in a few schools in a small trial. It aims to make pupils aware of the dangers of the internet. I don’t know details of the course content but the report mentions the usual suspects of chat rooms and internet grooming; spyware and viruses.

It’s an important issue and this course is probably a good way of making people more aware. My concern though is that in schools this sort of thing should be taught alongside any subject that uses the internet (ie. all of them) not as a separate course but as an important integrated part.

In the main I suspect teachers will teach internet safety in the same way a CDT teacher stops pupils losing limbs on certain machines – they only let pupils use certain sites. Whereas pupils should be given the knowledge to go off and discover sites then make informed decisions about whether it is safe or not.

It’s also important that this course stays relevant too, it’s no use if it sets itself up to say bebo is bad (it isn’t any way, if anything it’s just a bit rubbish) when in a year this could be wrong or irrelevant, and in five years totally obsolete.

teaching, internet, safety, SQA

The Scotsman is running a competition thing where you can vote for your favourite things about Scotland from a shortlist of 30. Here’s my take on them: (more…)