foolfillment: the blog

I’ve been toying with this idea for a few weeks, but I’d not done anything about it while I was offline. Now I am finally getting into gear.

I would like there to be a TeachMeet in the Scottish Borders sometime, mainly for selfish reasons as I do not think I’ll be able to make it to the Scottish Learning Festival this year. I realised that unless I (un)organise it then it is unlikely to happen so here I am asking you for your help.

I have a sneaking suspicion that there will be a fair few people in the Borders and surrounding areas who will also not be able to make it to SLF this year, but I don’t know how many though, and crucially I do not know how many people there are who would consider getting involved as well as just turning up.

If I go ahead and try to sort something out I will need help - I don’t know where I would find a suitable venue, I don’t know my way around well enough yet! I was thinking somewhere in Galashiels.

I also have a few questions, I’ve put together a short Google form which you can answer, or of course you can leave comments here on the blog.

My big question though is this - one option is to have it running on the same night as the event in Glasgow, with a possible link up. How do people feel about this? My own personal feeling is that it would be great for the people who wanted to get to Glasgow but can’t, I also think that it might be good to encourage new people along if it were mostly ‘locals’ - but the risk is nobody comes… What do you think?

I’ve been thinking a bit more about where I’ll be teaching next year. As there is nothing I can do to influence the decision I can only guess about where I’ll be living, but I wanted a better idea of the possibilities so I had a little play with Google’s new service My Maps. It took a lot of copying and pasting but I eventually got all of the secondary schools from my selected areas stuck onto a custom map. After a little more playing I’ve added it to my Google Earth places and arranged them into subfolders, and uploaded an image of the aerial view.

Looking at them this way was a bit of an eye opener. I knew that my choices meant I could be placed pretty much anywhere but seeing them all mapped really shows how remote some of the Highland ones are. I’ve not used Google Earth much but I did wonder (after finishing this) that there must already be a layer that has all of the Scottish schools? I wouldn’t know where to look, but surely I can’t be the only git sad enough to do this?!