“Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames
Saturday, 30 June 2007
For the somewhat limited audience of parents looking at neighbourhoods and schools in Victoria, Australia, I present the Victorian Schools / Google Maps Mashup. Note that there are two pages; one for secondary schools, one for primaries.
It’s not perfect (in particular, many of the addresses only have street resolution), but it does include both state and private schools, with affiliations, approximate enrolment numbers, URLs where available. Additionally state schools’ markers indicate their Like School Group — a curious and very useful metric. Clicking on the map also shows you the closest non-selective state school (which in theory is the one your kids should go to by default).
Have fun and report bugs below.
Filed under: Australia
I found a lot of errors of location or ommission. You may want to look at the Melways [1] to get accurate locations. (They're all marked, but it'll be a lot of manual work.)
Specifically (I grew up inner east):
- Kew Primary (Pakington St, Kew) was missing.
- Xavier college (Barkers Rd, Kew) is too far west.
- Gennezano (Cotham Rd, Kew) is too far west.
- Camberwell Girls (Burke Rd, Camberwell) is too far north.
- I've stopped looking. :-)-g.
[1] http://www.street-directory.com.au/
Saturday, June 30 2007 at 11:32 PM +10:00
P.S. Love the idea. :-)
Saturday, June 30 2007 at 11:33 PM +10:00
Geoff, did you click on the link at the top that says "nearby: Victorian Primary Schools"? :)
Many of the schools are on the wrong place in their street because the DoE doesn't provide street addresses, just street names. Usually, this doesn't cause much of a problem, but if it's a long street.
I can think of two ways to improve things;
1) Finding some way to get the school's street addresses out of the Web. I think this would probably involve pushing the data I have into search APIs and using a lot of heuristics on the results. I hate heuristics.
2) Making the markers draggable so that people could correct addresses if they were off. This would involve saving the state of the corrected markers on the back end (not a big deal) and authenticating people or otherwise blocking "drag spam" (more problematic).
Anything else pop to mind?
Sunday, July 1 2007 at 9:56 AM +10:00
An index on the page explaining what the letters and numbers mean would be nice...
...but what would be the killer bit of info. is if you can somehow get grades into it - like what was the average/min/max VCE that students achieved last year...
don't know how you can rank primary schools though...
is there some other statistic that the Department of Education in Victoria puts out that might be useful?
such as the turn over of teachers, the number of serious problems with children, etc?
although maybe that would require FOI'ing and knowing what to ask for?I mean I don't just want to see a map with where schools are, but how good they are too... and if lots of info can be presented in a condensed fashion (colours?), it would be interesting to see if there are trends in schools in various geographical areas of the city.
Monday, November 19 2007 at 8:22 PM +10:00
Hmmm, where I went to primary school (Watsonia Primary) is wrong on the map but my secondary school is correct (Ivanhoe Grammar).
Loyola College (Catholic) is missing completely - there should be two schools, one in Watsonia and one in Greensborough.
Also, are you able to put schools for the mentally handicapped on your map? Although perhaps less relevant to most people, schools that specialise in catering to "special" children like that do exist.
There is some more information here too:
http://www.gps-data-team.com/school-zones-download.htm
(GPS data for schools!)
- this *may* help with accuraccy of school location tags on your map?
Monday, November 19 2007 at 10:29 PM +10:00
Hi Darren,
How's it going?
WRT letter/number index -- see the bottom of the page; numbers are Like School Groups, and letters indicate type of private school.
LSG is the best information I could find about the qualities (but not necessarily quality) of a school. Follow the link in the key for more.
WRT special schools; the information is there, but it's hard to process. I'll look into it.
WRT addresses -- was your primary school on the right street? I'll look at the GPS data; thanks for the link.
Thursday, November 22 2007 at 8:21 AM +10:00