B.C. classroom sizes

by Leslie Young

We recently published a map of the classroom sizes at every public school in B.C.

To me, the interesting thing wasn’t just the map itself, which would be useful information for a local parent, but the fact that all the information for this map is open data.

I follow DataBC, the provincial government’s open data office on Twitter. I spotted a tweet that they had just added several education datasets onto their site.

The timing is interesting - the information was posted as the provincial government is in the middle of a dispute with the teachers’ union over various issues, including class sizes.

With a bit of digging through the DataBC catalogue, I found classroom sizes for 2010 as well as a geography file for all the school locations.

Bingo - the ingredients for an easy Fusion Tables map.

This is the first time I’ve created a map using only open data. Most of the time, government datasets do not really have much of an obvious news application. The geographic files are generally good, but the information released tends to be bland.

I’m hopeful that this will change.