Computer Textbooks For High Schoolers?

wetdogjp writes "I recently became a high school teacher, and I've inherited three classes with no textbooks! While two of my classes are introductory in nature, one for computers in general and the other for networking, the third class should prepare juniors and seniors to enter the workforce and start a career in computers. We have some older textbooks by Heathkit available, but the newest of them are four years old. Do Slashdotters have any favorite textbooks that can help kids on their way to becoming junior sysadmins, programmers, networking professionals, etc.? Would you suggest books to prepare students to take certification tests such as A+, Network+, or others? Any textbooks we use would need to cover quite a breadth of material, such as PC hardware, operating systems, networking, security, and more."

Comments

Professor and Pat

[tkosan]

I am in the process of writing a series of free ebooks for high school age students which teach the detailed fundamentals of how a computer works:

http://professorandpat.org/

The programming books are designed to work with a free development environment called MathRider:

http://mathrider.org/

Some of your students may find these to be useful.

Ted

Re:paper is overrated

[halcyon1234]

Maybe we need an IT-wiki-ebook.

Make it the class project! ;-)

I was going to suggest the same thing. Even if you can't get webspace from your school's IT department, it'd be a trivial matter to set up a LAMP computer on your classroom's LAN and install MediaWiki on it-- or shell out ~$50 and get yourself a economy hosted website somewhere that offers a LAMP stack.

Then put up a skeleton structure for the course. Add some pages about what the course is, the curriculum and goals, time line, etc.

As each lesson comes around (or even a few in advance) post your notes to the wiki. Encourage students to elaborate or expand upon the wiki in any positive way. That can be anything from adding some links to educational sites, to updating out-of-date information, to fixing spelling & grammar.

Then, as a class project, break your class up into teams of 2-3 people. Assign each of them a course topic. Have them research the material, and for a deliverable, they need to create the wiki page for that topic. Give them some guidelines (must have 3 sources that will be [cited], must contain at least 3 useful links to other intra-wiki pages, etc). Maybe even have them present their findings. Future classes might have the same requirements, but instead must find 2 new facts about their topic that aren't currently in the wiki.

Make sure you have a nice index page, set up the Random page, and the thing will build itself. It's something that each student will have had a hand in making. Limit editing to Registered Only, and make sure you approve accounts (or pre-generate them for your students). This will cut down on vandalism. It will also give you, the person who will be grading their work, a full snapshot of who did what work, as well as a complete revision history.

At the end of the semester, not only will you have a really good completed project, but it will also be extremely useful for future classes. You effectively have all your notes created and kept in a presentable manner. You can even put it on a public-facing computer, and open it up for other classes or teachers (even those beyond your own school) to use. (You might want to limit it to a public read-only, until you are ready to release the entire project into the wild...)