ScotEduBlogs is an aggregation of Scottish Educational Blogs. It gather posts from Scottish educational bloggers. It also tweets out the new posts via @scotendblogs twitter account.
All the links point back to the originating site, the idea is to make reading about Scottish education easier, not to steal content. All the bloggers are willing participants.
The previous ScotEduBlogs site aggregated several hundred feeds from Scottish blogs. This site is starting off in a less ambitious manner. As of July 2013 it aggregates 90 odd sites by professionals, eg teachers, leaders etc. I have dropped school and class blogs for the time being as well as individual pupil blogs. Partly from a usability point of view partly to see how the new host hold up to 90 blogs.
I hope to add to the list of professional blogs and and you can submit your blog.
History
Way back at the beginning of time, well about 2005, there was a first flourishing of blogging in Scottish education lead by Ewan Macintosh.
This lead to a wiki being developed, scotedublogs where folk could add their blogs, organised by Local Authority.
After a while we had gathered over 100 blogs and a wiki was not a good solution for connecting to and reading them. I tested a homemade SimplePie aggregator, which lead to this comment:
It would be great if we could have some aggregated feeds from Scotedublogs, or give people the ability to create their own ‘pick and choose’ feed? from Andrew Brown
Which lead to another post and a comment from Robert Jones:
The wiki has been a great success, but it’s time to take the data and move on to a simple wee app. … I’d be happy to help out – it’d be a super quick job in Ruby on Rails. I registered scotedublogs.org.uk the other day,
This resulted in Robert being Joined by Pete Liddle and creating a Ruby site that aggregated blogs and provided feeds for various sets of posts (eg tagged for a LA or subject).
For a while there seemed to be a similar development at LTS (Now Education Scotland) outlined by Ewan: Creating a town from a village: scotedublogs, but as far as I know this was never launched.
SEB as was was first hosted by Robert and later with sponsorship from LTS and the SQA got its own server. As of 2013 the site is sponsored by the SQA.
Recently I had some ideas for redeveloping the site, discussing them with Robert lead to a bit of thinking about how much work was involved and the fact that Robert would bear the burden of the development. Given that he now has more professional and personal commitments I suggested simplifying the site and moving it to wordpress using FeedWordPress as the aggregator. This would mean that I would be able to handle some development with my baby steps php , html and JavaScript. This site is the result.