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)

Another post about a resource, I’ve just found Scrapblog (via meish.org). This tool lets you easily create scrap book style webpages where you can bring in photos from loads of different sites like flickr and photobucket, videos form youTube, then style them as you like, add text and colours.

Once it’s done you can publish it to a load of different places, you can produce DVDs, or flickr photosets, or books, even embed it in your own website.

It seem very easy to use and links in with loads of different sites so it could be a fantastic tool to use in schools to create reports about school trips, experiments, shows, anything.

Go and have a look at the scrapblog tour to see how easy it is to use.

IDEA has just announced its ‘call for submission’ for Thaw 2007. IDEA is the Industrial Designers of Edmonton Association (so not local) and Thaw is an event which gives “visitors an opportunity to view and purchase innovative and original products and ideas.”

The brief is interesting, in short it is ‘imagine there was no oil.’ I don’t see anything stopping schools in Scotland taking up this challenge, there is no benefit of actually submitting to this event - the only prize as such would be recognition so the costs would far outweigh the benefits - but a local (within school or authority?) equivalent competition could be feasible and would tie in very nicely with areas of the curriculum, citizenship for example. Of course most of the crafting that happens in schools is with wood or metal anyway so ruling out plastic isn’t too much of a hurdle, but try coming up with a new CD case, or redesigning most of the stuff in your kitchen.

via Land+Living

[tags]idea, design, sustainable development, schools, thaw2007[/tags]