Cross posted on TechLearning.com...
In my school district we are beginning our staffing and enrollment planning for the next school year. In the case of my school we have a new boundary change which has added a new level of uncertainty based on the fact that while kindergarten aged students in the new area are automatically slotted for my school, students living in that area already enrolled in our district have the option of staying at their current school or moving to my school. The process for this decision making plays out over the next six weeks so I will have to make some staffing and grade level configuration decisions based on the best information available at this time. To help with with this decision making process I have plotted the addresses of the students in question in Google Earth. By visually seeing where these students live I can get a better idea of how close they live to my school and how likely they are to make the move based on things like walking distance and transportation options. To do this I took the addresses of the students in question and plotted them with tool called the batchgeocoder (batchgeocoder.com). This web tool created by Phillip Holmstrand allows you to...
"map any kind of street address list, for example copied from Excel, and geocode the addresses to get latitude and longitude coordinates using the tool below. The data can then be mapped in your browser, downloaded into Google Earth, saved to a web page, or transferred back into your spreadsheet. You can also use this tool to calculate distances to multiple addresses from a single point, or get quick driving directions to multiple destinations. Mapping multiple locations with your own custom data takes seconds, just follow the 6 steps below to plot your own data on a fully interactive multi-point map..."
By using this information, along with other information from my school district, I can begin this process with a few more educated assumptions and in the process make better decisions for my program and students.
Technorati Tags: Batchgeocoder, Google Earth