EdTechie PLN

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 free web-based tool that tracks and analyzes how you spend time while at your computer.Once the application is installed it runs in the background, monitoring both your web-browsing habits and application usage. (It does stop if you get up and walk away, so lunchtime is still your time).The service does everything from assigning you a basic efficiency rating to providing categorical breakdowns of how much time you spend on different activities (using Excel would fall under "Business" while looking at cat videos would fall under "Leisure Surfing").The time-tracking reports and graphs will show you precisely how you're spending your time (by day, week, month and year) and what activities you're doing (and, by default, not doing).Those looking to get serious may want to upgrade to RescueTime Pro (the plan starts at $5.30 per month) to take advantage of extra features. One that's especially helpful is FocusTime, which allows you to block all Internet "distractions" for a specified period of time. 

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.

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