Category: Technology

I’ll be live blogging the “Stevenote” here if at all possible. I’ll begin posting updates sometime after 9am PST, including pictures from my Ghetto phone (my Treo). If for some reason I can’t use my laptop I’ll probably just use twitter, so check my updates if there’s nothing here:

http://twitter.com/markwagner/

Since there will undoubtedly be many more mainstream bloggers covering it better and more quickly than I’ll be able to manage, I’ll do my best to deliver the news from an educator’s perspective so that this blog (or my twitter updates) might provide an additional benefit for my colleagues.

Leave me a comment this morning if you have any other suggestions, ideas, or requests.

Google Maps: Drag and Drop Directions (Via Education/Technology – Tim Lauer.) I’ve been wanting this!

Google Maps has added a feature that allows you to get directions, and then by dragging and dropping points, instantly update and change the route and the information. Great for planning walking field trips at school. For example a popular trip for our teachers is to visit the Cooley Art Gallery at Reed College. Reed is less than a mile away. If you type in a request for driving directions, you get a pretty good route by car, but since we are walking, we need to adjust the map. Just click on the blue route marker and drag and the route is automatically updated. A video from Google below shows how easy this is.

So, back on may 29th I posted about a major slow down at Surveymonkey after their big upgrade. Ryan Finley, the presendent of the company, commented to explain that the problem had been solved. Last week I had the chance to create some new surveys from scratch, and there are indeed some cool new features… and I like the interface for reading results better, too. I don’t want to go into detail – I just wanted to be sure to leave a positive post in the wake of the negative one. In short, I’m still happy with my Surveymonkey account, and it’s even better now than before.

And, no, I’m not in any way affiliated with the company or Ryan… ‘just trying to be fair.

Apple Store – Higuera Street. My friend Ryan, who attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo with me, sent me this story. He’s from Fresno, and his subject line was “never in a million years.”

I’m a big fan of online surveys and have taught many teachers and administrators to use SurveyMonkey.com specifically. They’ve rolled out a major overhaul of their interface… and I don’t think I like it. I was excited at first of course, but it is VERY SLOW – and for no trade off in cool new features that I can see. And, I had to redo some things I’ve done before. Bummer… so far.

Lifehacker Top 10: Top 10 Mac OS X tweaks (Via Lifehacker.) This caught my eye… and then I was amazed that there was three that were new to me and I needed to use. :)

Official Google Mac Blog: Google Desktop for Mac This is the cool technology find for the day… for Mac users.

This link comes from David Brussin via email:

This is quite a cool dashboard widget… it finds all of your
installed software packages and checks for updates. Kind of like
apple’s Software Update, but for everything else on your system.

http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/appupdate.html

Meanwhile, I’m back up to 1400 unread items in my feeds… and these are mostly my favorite blogs that I want to actually spend time reading. :(