Maps of the school

[robjduk]

Hello,

Are any of you involved in creating a map of your school? We used to have a DT teacher do it who then retired. The job passed to us somehow and my predecessor made an ok effort in Visio but its becoming a pain to maintain every year and all we get is criticism. I would have thought it would only be a few hundred pounds to have a company create a nice and easy to read version and maybe a flashy interactive map for our website so does anyone have experience of any companies and/or links to examples?

 

Thank you

[unixman_again]

I did ours. Got the site plans, imported them into sketchup and used that to build a model. Exported the model as a png and then used part of the cs4 suite to add clickable buttons which popup photos of the building when hovered over and open a web page about the building when clicked. Easy peasy! I've also exported the sketchup model as an A1 size pdf, which we've had printed and laminated and is used on open day. There has been some talk of having the sketchup model 3d printed and put on display.

[sdc]

I used the Google Earth aerial shot of our site, copied and pasted it into Powerpoint, and drew shapes over the buildings to obtain the correct (and pretty much to-scale) outlines.

[JJonas]

@unixman_again Can you share the sketchup file? Like the idea of this and want to see how it turned out.

[TechMonkey]

It shouldn't be that hard to maintain surely? Unless you do major building works every year?

 

At my previous place IT used to keep it updated just because no one else did and we used them a lot. Here I found an Estates guy had done them in Visio and just used them. May try and Sketchup-ise them at some point.

[webman]

I used the Google Earth aerial shot of our site, copied and pasted it into Powerpoint, and drew shapes over the buildings to obtain the correct (and pretty much to-scale) outlines.

 

I did a similar thing when I was working at the school, but used Visio instead. With use of layers, the core Visio map allowed various versions to be created easily - emergency exit plans, simplified versions for visitors, and the website.

 

If you have Visio, I can highly recommend using it

[dhicks]

Got the site plans, imported them into sketchup and used that to build a model.

 

That sounds like a good idea. I've used Inkscape images with layers before to draw the various services over a scale plan of the school, but a 3D version sounds way cooler.

[robjduk]

thank you for all the opinions out there. Im surprised so many of you do it really but given me some good ideas. Thanks