foolfillment: the blog

I’ve been quiet here for a while (how many times have I started a blog post like that?) but it’s now the end of the October break and I’m ready to get back to school.

I thought I’d write a little about things that I’ve been thinking about over the last few weeks. In my last post I linked to a few things that I was going to try with my S4 Graphics class, the lesson itself went fine but a few things happened as a result of using some social web tools that surprised and disappointed me. My over-riding feeling to came out of it and other related events was that at Ross High we aren’t doing enough to prepare our pupils for the world where everyone has an audience, everyone is a contributor, and everyone leaves a trail.

I really wanted to get along to the Internet Safety training event at Musselburgh Grammar School that Ollie Bray ran. While I didn’t manage to make it Neil Winton thankfully did. He wrote about the evening and has since also flagged up a few things I’d like to take into school tomorrow and talk to people about. I know that there are Ross parents hoping for a similar evening to be run for them.

This morning I made the time to watch Ewan McIntosh’s keynote from the ULearn07 conference. Once again there was lots to think over, but this time it was the idea of fear of failure, and over-planning. I’m going in to school tomorrow with a renewed enthusiasm to try some new things without the fear that I think I’ve been trapped by in the first part of this term (if I can’t try some new things when I’m on 0.7 will I find the time when I get a 1FTE contract) and I’m going to try and show off a few ideas to other teachers in the department to see if they can take them somewhere further.

Jim McDougall left a comment last night saying he’d added my blog to his map of ScotEduBlogs.

It go me thinking about my map of Scottish Schools again, there is already a list of ScotEduBlogs with certain pieces of data : blog’s name; blogger’s name; description; tags. If one of the bits of data was a postcode then it should be possible to output that to another application. I suddenly realised that there must be an easy way to get data into Google Maps dynamically using it’s API, how else would all of the mashups work?

So one quick search later and I’ve found this map generator from the Official Google Maps API blog which takes data from a Google Spreadsheet and creates a Google Map. I’ve not tested it yet but hope to find time soon. It should then be easy as pie to make a map for all schools in Scotland from a database that already exists, if I can get access to it.

With flickrvision going 3D this week that sort of toy was nearer the front of my mind than it might otherwise have been, it gave me this idea: what about a dynamically refreshing picture of the latest posts from ScotEduBlogs? While there’s a lot of activity I think you might still be looking for a while before it changes :).