Group items tagged

Thanks to a new site called Walk Score, you can now determine the "walkability" rating of thousands of neighborhoods. The site considers a variety of factors (location of amenities, proximity of public transport) and assigns your neighborhood a numerical convenience grade.  It ranks each neighborhood on a scale from 0 (totally car-dependent) to 100 (Walker's Paradise).To give you some sense of rankings, Manhattan's Tribeca scores 100 while Atlanta's Buckhead earns a 61 (which makes it "somewhat walkable").To date the simple yet comprehensive site covers more than 2,500 neighborhoods in 40 major American cities. When you enter an address or neighborhood the site generates both a walkability score and a detailed map with nearby recreational, commercial, cultural, and social points of interest. This is useful if you're visiting a city and want to see how your hotel ranks.But Walk Score's greatest return on investment lies in its utility as a tool to guide real estate purchases, since walkability is generally linked to increased financial value (i.e. more walkable neighborhoods command greater prices).

a guide to coffee shops that have free Internet access (though they also take into account the number of power outlets and 3G reception). At the moment they rank some 300 coffee shops in North America, the UK and Australia. The list is not huge, but that's because it only has cafés they or their readers have first hand experience with. You can search by city or postal code (or choose from a roster of cities on their home page). The iPhone app detects your location to automatically find the nearest free wi-fi and power-ready laptop friendly café.  (And it will show you on a map, and provide directions).

a great new service called GoodGuide, which reveals what's really beneath the labels of 70,000 products, including food, toys, personal care items and household products.The site offers a massive database of product reviews, expert advice and brand rankings, evaluating supposedly healthy products based on their personal, environmental and social impact.  You can search for a specific product or browse by category. Dive into a sub-category-household cleaners, say-and you'll see a ranked list of all the products they review (every product is given a ranking out of 10), starting with the top ranked.   Click on a specific product and you're taken to a page that has detailed ratings, information on the ingredients, user reviews and a host of details about what goes into the overall ranking.In addition to these thorough reviews, the site has relevant articles and issue guides. They also have a free iPhone app that allows you to scan the barcodes of various products when you're at the store for health and environmental ratings.

from Free Technology for Teacehrs Digital storytelling guru Kevin Hodgson has recently launched a new website all about stopmotion movie creation. Kevin developed Making Stopmotion Movies as a how-to resource for teachers who are interested in having students create stopmotion movies. On Making Stopmotion Movies teachers will find downloadable storyboard and character development guides. Kevin provides an excellent outline of the whole movie making process. Visitors to Making Stopmotion Movies will also find video examples of real student productions. Below you will find one of the videos from Making Stopmotion Movies. Applications for EducationIf you've wanted to try a stopmotion or claymation movie project in your classroom, but you weren't sure how to get started, Making Stopmotion Movies should get you off on the right foot.