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NECC Presentations @ Google Teaching Theater : June 29 - July 1

Say you're an investor and you want to see how two companies are faring against each other on the market. You could type in "IBM versus Apple" and Wolfram|Alpha will generate graphs and tables to compare the stocks over time. It also give you the Web-based sources used to generate the data, so you know where the numbers are coming from. The site also solves equations and shows the steps it took to do so, which will be of interest to high school students and math majors. Not into number crunching? If you live near the coast, you could type in "tides in ____" and find charts of tidal and lunar information. You could also graph that against other cities, which would be cool if you're a surfer. The site is also interesting for academic queries. Type in "Internet users in Africa" and you'll get the total number of Web users there - 51 million - as well as lists of the number of users by country plus graphs of this information. If you're in the fisheries business, or if you're an environmentalist, you could type in "fish produced in Italy versus France" to get an idea of how that sector is faring. The answer includes specifics, like how much of the fish crop was farmed versus what was captured. Such data could be used to argue policy points or to debate whether or not certain industries are sustainable.

Today, Ning is about to deliver some of that functionality to their 700,000 social network creators with Ning Apps, giving them more than 90 new toys - think apps like Qik, Twitter, Ustream, Box.net,  Tokbox, WordPress, Mailchimp, and PollDaddy - that they can use to enhance their individual networks.

Google's Book Search program will help the blind and wheelchair-bound read more, a disability group told a federal judge Wednesday, giving Google some much needed support in its attempt to create the online library and bookstore of the future.

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Get your class reviewing and recommending books to one another.

A netbook is a laptop with a shrunken screen, an undersize keyboard and a processor that's so slow, you'd have laughed at it in 2007. The netbooks' crucial attractions are tiny dimensions, light weight and low cost, usually $350 to $500. Otherwise, they're all about compromises.

Twitter has become an incredible tool not just for communication, but for improving your life. College students can use it to expand their social circle,

If you use the Notebook software and a SMART Board you have to check this out! This is awesome! Tables, introduced in Notebook 10, have proven to be a great tool for teachers to create simple activities.  Recently TeqSmart discovered a new way to  use

I greatly enjoyed Clive Thompson's recent Wired article on netbooks. For years laptop manufacturers have been giving us more and more powerful computers: bigger hard drives, more memory, faster processing chips, etc. What netbooks have shown, however, is that many laptop users actually need less, not more. When 95% of...