Easy idea sharing for teachers

January 2nd, 2006 | by Tim Wilson |

I feel the need to geek out and do some programming every once in a while. My recent days off providing a great opportunity so I decided to implement an idea that’s been rattling around in my brain for a while. We’ve got seven elementary schools in my district and, not surprisingly, the teachers don’t communicate between schools as much as they would like. We’ve got electronic mailing lists for each building, but what if you’re a 6th grade teacher and you want to send a quick message to all the other 6th grade math teachers about a cool Web site you discovered? What if you want to send a message to all 5th and 6th grade teachers who teach social studies? Maintaining your own private mailing list for every permutation is obviously not a viable option.

So I figured that I could build a simple Web application to do this. It’s really just a proof of concept at this point because I’m still testing some things, but so far it looks promising. If you look at the screenshot you can get an idea how it works. Just check the boxes to determine the recipients and type the message. We’ll have a database on the backend that knows the school(s), grade(s), and subject(s) for each teacher.

Idea Blaster screenshot

I see great potential here for encouraging easy sharing of all kinds of information across schools. Even if no one uses it, I had plenty of fun flexing my Python programming muscles.

  1. 6 Responses to “Easy idea sharing for teachers”

  2. By Tom Hoffman on Jan 3, 2006 | Reply

    So what did you use? Turbogears?

  3. By Tim Wilson on Jan 3, 2006 | Reply

    No, just plain old CGI. Nothing too fancy. Next project I will definitely give TurboGears a whirl. It’s not nearly as polished as Ruby on Rails at this point, but it’s developing quickly. You get a lot more interface widgets “for free” with Rails at this point, for example. But since I don’t know Ruby, and I don’t have much time to learn it these days, I’ll probably stick with Python.

  4. By Tom on Jan 8, 2006 | Reply

    I’d been waiting to see what you’d come up with for this. I remember you posting on the idea some time ago. That’s a nice and simple way to do things certainly.

    It’d be nice to be able to have the selections added as tags (history, 6th for example- maybe a blank field for custom tags?) and posted to the web with the content and links automatically created on a central index. That way there’d be a permenant searchable database of all the messages for teachers to browse now and in the future. You’d probably need an “opt out” button for this as not everything should go to the web I imagine.

    I don’t have your programming skills (or really any at all :) ) but I’ve been attempting do something similar at http://byrdmiddle.org/links. It’s nothing fancy- a wordpress blog with the ultimate tag warrior plugin but I think the concept is sound. I’ll be trying to get teachers posting lessons and resouces to it on their own as things progress.

  5. By sdf on Feb 14, 2006 | Reply

    dumb question: is this nice software available anywhere?

  6. By Tim Wilson on Feb 15, 2006 | Reply

    I’d love to make it available when it’s done. I’ll have to figure out a place to post it.

  7. By sdf on Feb 16, 2006 | Reply

    how about sourceforge?

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