What's on your short list of technology books?

Another query via e-mail last week:

Mr. Johnson,
I heard you speak ... a couple of years ago and really enjoyed listening to you. Then today I was asked a question that I just knew you would be able to answer. We are needing to purchase a book or two over the subject of how technology can improve academic achievement. I figured that you probably have a list of books that you could suggest that you could quickly sent to me - at least I hope that is the case. And thank you for your time - and for being such an "up-to-date" and knowlegeable resource.
Melissa

My inadequate response...

Hi Melissa,

I appreciate your confidence and kind words, but I really don't maintain such a list. There are lots of books with lots of ideas - all with very, very little empirical evidence to back up claims of improved student performance/achievement. (One of the problems is there is no consensus on “academic achievement.”)

Some places you might start are reports rather than books. I would recommend reading:

• "Technology in Schools: What the Research Says" by the Metiri Group
• Ensuring the Net Generation Is Net Savvy by George Lorenz and Charles Dziuban for Educause

I would also skim through the book titles at ISTE to see if any look like they suit your needs. ISTE is a credible source of information on educational technology.

I wish I could be more helpful. Sounds like a great question for Blue Skunk blog readers!

All the best,

Doug

OK, astute readers. What would you recommend Melissa put on her short list of books about technology's impact on student achievement? I feel like I am somehow overlooing the obvious.

Mystery readers

Cool idea from one our high school library media specialists:

Volunteer "mystery readers" needed!

In honor of I Love to Read month, [the principal] has graciously allowed us to start SSR time for 3 Fridays with a mystery reader.

What does a mystery reader do?

Read over the intercom for no more than one minute at the start of SSR. If you have a particular well-known (or not-so-well-known) paragraph, you may provide your own. If you think you would need help with a selection, I have a few available. Just email me if you'd like to be a reader. ...

How and why should classes participate?

The mystery reader will only read for a minute or so. After the reader is done, the class should decide who the reader is and what they just read. There might even be a prize for most (appropriately) creative answer! It would probably work best for the teacher to email me the answers. The classes who are correct will be announced in the bulletin on Monday, plus they will go into a drawing for a prize to be given the following week.

Please help us promote reading this month by participating in this fun low-stress event!

Were I a mystery reader, this would be my paragraph - the best one ever written IMHO:

When the pirate Sir Francis Drake attacked Riohacha in the sixteenth century, Ursula Iguaran’s great-great-grandmother became so frightened with the ringing of alarm bells and the firing of cannons that she lost control of her nerves and sat down on a lighted stove. The burns changed her into a useless wife for the rest of her days. She could only sit on one side, cushioned by pillows, and something strange must have happened to her way of walking, for she never walked again in public. She gave up all kinds of social activity, obsessed with the notion that her body gave off a singed odor. Dawn would find her in the courtyard, for she did not dare fall asleep lest she dream of the English and their ferocious attack dogs as they came through the windows of her bedroom to submit her to shameful tortures with their red-hot irons. Her husband, an Aragonese merchant by whom she had two children, spent half the value of his store on medicines and pastimes in an attempt to alleviate her terror. Finally he sold the business and took the family to live far from the sea in a settlement of peaceful Indians located in the foothills, where he built his wife a bedroom without windows so that the pirates of her dream would have no way to get in. Gabriel Garcia Marques, One Hundred Years of Solitude.

An entire love story in a single paragraph.

Your favorite paragraph?

If you don't tell your children you love them...

If you don't tell your children that you love them, they'll find someone online who will. - Moorhead police officer, Mike Detloff

Online predators are in the news again with 90,000 profiles of sex offenders being removed from MySpace. And because of the stories, the calls for blocking social networking sites in schools are being voiced again.

Thankfully Anne Collier at NetFamilyNews.org puts the issue into some sort of rational perspective in Sex offenders in social sites: Consider the facts:

• Not all children are equally at risk of Net-related sexual exploitation (see "Enhancing Child Safety and Online Technologies" from the US's Internet Safety Technical Task Force, with a summary of all child-online-safety research to date).
• A child's psychosocial makeup and family environment are better predictors of risk than the technology he or she uses (also from the ISTTF report).
• The kids most at risk offline are those at risk online (see "Profile of a teen online victim" and the ISTTF report).
• Sexual exploitation as a result of Internet activity (much less social networking) is statistically rare - "too low to calculate in the two national samples we conducted," the Crimes Against Children Research Center has told me.
• The vast majority of teens - 91% - use social sites to keep in touch with friends they see frequently (mostly at school), not strangers ('07 Pew/Internet study).
• The offenders in the vast majority of child sexual abuse cases are not strangers to their victims (multiple sources).
• Despite the establishment of one or more public profiles of "teens" (fake profiles) on MySpace by the Pennsylvania attorney general's Child Predator Unit, "there has apparently not been one successful sting operation initiated on MySpace in the more than two years during which these sting profiles have been in existence" (see "Pennsylvania case study: Social networking risk in context").

Banning rather than teaching online safety strategies is the wrong approach. Period. Blocking access from schools pushes kids to using these sites in places that may have no adult monitoring at all. And while we do need to make sure all students are safe Internet users, are we going the extra mile with those kids who are most at risk? Those whose parents don't tell them that they love them?

Read and share Anne's full post. Get people asking smarter questions about the real Internet safety issues.