Financially strapped college students spend enough time worrying about how to put gas in the car or even how to pay for lunch. Making sure you have the proper tools to get your education shouldn’t be one of those concerns, and often, software costs are prohibitive to the dorm budget.

However, the brilliant minds at Google have offered Google Docs for sometime as part of their Gmail service. Within Google Docs you have free access to create spreadsheets, documents and slideshow presentations. And better than the software you’d have on your desktop, you can access them from anywhere you access your Gmail – so no worries about computer crashes or leaving a paper at home.

These free programs come with all the functionality you’d expect from purchased software programs, plus a lot more accessibility. The interface is incredibly simple to use, as is sharing files with group members for shared contribution. Read the rest of this entry »

Google is underway in its enormous book digitization project, collaborating with university libraries in what is said to be the “ultimate combination of technology and scholarship.” It will make millions of volumes and journals available to audiences that would otherwise be unable to visit these major research libraries in person. To some, the project represents a “dangerous centralization and corporatization of content.”

Complicating the debate has been uncertainty about how Google would make the new library available. Google is pledging free “preview” access to all books in the collection, inexpensive ways for individuals to purchase digital access to a full book, and pricing that would make it possible for colleges to buy site licenses to the collections. Read the rest of this entry »

NASA, Google, and some of the foremost authorities in science and technology have teamed up to create a new school, dubbed Singularity University, that is looking to solve “humanity’s grand challenges”. The university is named after the idea of the singularity – an extremely rapid period of technological progress. This sounds like the coolest school ever.

Modeled after the International Space University, the school is meant to expose some of the world’s most promising graduate students and professionals to a broad range of cutting-edge technologies and research with subjects including bioinformatics, networking, genetics, law, heath, and entrepreneurship.

Learn more here.