jonlee.ca

While I was doing my Bachelors in Education, I had a discussion with some fellow teachers regarding Internet usage in the classroom. One thing we agreed was dangerous about the Internet was not only the amount of inappropriate material, but also the amount of misinformation out there.

I took it upon myself to create an “educational directory”. This has been done before but I decided to spice it up with a little AJAX and give it a more Web 2.0 feel. The result: tagedu – a tag based educational directory for teachers and students.

What sets it apart
The directory is focused entirely on tags. When users submit a site, they must tag it with keywords. Upon searching, you can place tags you are interested in into your “tag basket” which will then filter out non-relevant sites.

Sites are also rated by users in terms of their usefulness so they can be sorted from best to worse. The goal here is to let students and researchers quickly find the most appropriate and most useful site for the topic they are looking for.

I was actually very proud of myself for coming up with the “tag basket” idea and term. To the best of my knowledge, no one else has ever called it that so if it catches on, you know who started it .

Bit off more than I could chew
However, it turned out to be too big an initiative. Getting the site up was the easy part, filling it with good educational resources turned out to be a huge undertaking. I didn’t implement a captcha on the submission page so there is a gigantic backlog of spam sites awaiting approval with some real sites mixed in.

What now?
I haven’t touched the site for nearly a year now, and I’m not sure what I should do with it. Any suggestions on what I should do with this site? It would be a shame to see it go to waste. I’ve presented the idea to several educational figures in my school board but alas, they were not technologically inclined enough to recognize the merit or potential this has.

Check it out and let me know what you think!

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 11:12 pm and is filed under Personal, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.