Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Pew research released fresh stats on what slice of Americans are addicted to all of the various social networks as of December 2012. There are a few big business and cultural implications.

"Google just mistakenly announced updated versions of its Google Drive apps for iOS and Android that will go live within the next couple of days. Google has since deleted this post, but the updates are scheduled to arrive soon. Both native apps are getting a slew of new (and necessary) features that will make them far more usable, but most importantly, the iPhone app will soon allow you to edit documents right in the app. "

"My hunch is that we will hear something from Apple late2011 about Thunderbolt use with iPads/iPhones .. now that the technology is out there on two of their most popular devices .. Thunderbolt seems to be a more viable and smart near-term solution for device sync rather than a full-on cloud sync."

"Google Translate just added a cool new feature that allows you to easily create a personalized phrasebook with the phrases and sentences you want to memorize and/or find yourself translating repeatedly."

You may know TED, not as the guy from marketing, but as the nonprofit organization devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading" - or as the set of global conferences, Talks, and videos that touch on the many heady, relevant issues surrounding Technology, Entertainment, and Design. As an increasingly powerful medium through which the world's experts share their hard-won knowledge, TED is also an educator. In March, the organization launched the first phase of its "TED-Ed" initiative, in practice a series of a dozen short animated YouTube videos "created for high school students and lifelong learners," in the big picture an invitation to teachers to collaborate with TED to create more effective video lessons that can be used in classrooms.

Edmodo is one of the startups whose name pops up a lot when you talk about "edtech." Founded in 2007, the company is almost old school, yet, in spite of the influx of new education-focused startups, Edmodo continues to press forward. This is largely due to due to its appeal as a social learning platform for K-12 education - one that has earned it the "Facebook for the classroom" moniker - meaning that Edmodo enables teachers to share to share content, manage projects, assignments and notifications, distribute quizzes and events - both among students and colleagues. But the real key, and where it departs from being synonymous with an "educational Facebook," is that all this collaboration and classroom management takes place within a network that it completely private and secure.

Google Maps for Android is fantastic. Between its free GPS Navigation feature, speedy downloads thanks to vector-based maps, and offline caching, the app is leagues ahead of the Maps app on iOS. Today, Maps for Android is getting upgraded to version 6.0, and it includes a long-anticipated feature that presents a huge technical challenge: indoor maps. Yes, you'll now be able to fire up Maps in some malls, airports, and department stores to get your bearings, complete with that 'little blue dot' that shows you where you are. 

"Google launched an open source course building web application for the growing list of K-12 and big-name universities developing online classes. The barebones website is a lightweight way to bring course material online, track student engagement (with web traffic and surveys), and evaluate performance. "We want to use this launch to show that Google believes it can contribute to technology in education," says Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig."

Computer technology has penetrated the classroom for thirty years with little impact. After hundreds of "disruptive" education startups, the best innovation in education is still the chalkboard. This isn't the fault of the entrepreneurs, but the fault of an education system which resists innovation at every turn.

Another interesting article

A number of organizations offer public map data through Google Maps, but finding it can be tricky -- if you even know it exists. That may not be an issue now that Google has just launched its Maps Gallery. The web portal showcases location info from both Google and a slew of its Maps Engine partners, ranging from the World Bank's internet usage stats to National Geographic's historical overlays. This is really just the start of the search firm's map discovery efforts, though. Google tells TechCrunch that it wants to surface public maps in regular search results, and it would also like to draw attention to Maps Engine Lite data created by amateur cartographers.

"Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams has an ambitious new plan: to shift our daily reading habits away from consuming incremental news bites and towards engaging with enlightened ideas curated by an intelligent algorithm. Ordinarily, such a goal would seem utopian, were it not for the fact that Williams is among a handful of Internet pioneers who have disrupted the media industry multiple times.

"Google today significantly dropped the prices for its Google Drive online storage service. The first 15GB of storage remain free, but 100GB now costs just $1.99 per month instead of $4.99."

"Google today announced the launch of Web Designer, a new tool for building interactive HTML5 sites and ads. The company first hinted at this launch in June, but had been quiet about it ever since. Web Designer, which Google calls a "professional-quality design tool," is now officially in public beta and available for download for Mac and Windows."