Next week on September 7th Wolfram Alpha is hosting a free webinar for teachers. The webinar will provide an overview of how to use Wolfram Alpha’s computational search engine. Participants will also be introduced to using Wolfram Alpha to create custom widgets to enhance learning experiences. The webinar will be repeated on September 15. You can find the details on the webinars and register for them here.

Applications for Education
While Wolfram Alpha is a natural fit for mathematics lessons, the webinar announcement promises to offer something for every content area. From the view point of  a social studies teacher one of the things I like about Wolfram Alpha is the quick “fact sheets” that my students can pull up. For example, if I want my students to quickly find some demographic and economic data about Libya they can simply type “Libya” into the search box to have that info right at their finger tips. This allows us to then spend more class time discussing and analyzing the significance of that data instead of searching for the data.