school author visits — Terry Freedman's ICT & Computing in Education blog — ICT & Computing in Education

Author reading to a school assembly. Image generated in Ideogram.ai

Get the most from visiting authors

April 25, 2025

You might think an author visit wouldn’t be of much use in a subject like Computing, but you’d be mistaken.

Books for the classroom, by Terry Freedman

How to get the most from school author visits

July 26, 2019

As well as having an ed tech library, why not look into inviting an author of a computing book to speak to your pupils?

Recent book reviews

A book review for your English department colleagues perhaps

Some of these stories are so richly told, it can almost seem as though you’re right there with him.

Review: Pen Names

OK, so this has nothing to do with education technology, but we all read (I hope!). A very interesting examination of the pen names some authors have adopted, and why.

Review: The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of History

There's a really interesting section in this book about how ceramic storage of data and information is probably the most likely medium to stand the test of time.

A book review for your biology colleagues perhaps

The subject under discussion here is how human physiology has developed in different ways, in response to different conditions around the world.

Review: Social Media for Academics

This book is very readable, and if I sound surprised that is because it’s not always true of academics!

Quick looks: VIBE Coding by Example

For the time being, this book is free in Kindle format.

Review: The Game Changers: How Playing Games Changed the World and Can Change You Too

Despite the relative paucity of immediately obvious National Curriculum links, teachers will find several of sections of this book to be highly engaging.

Review: The Dictators: 64 Dictators, 64 Authors, 64 Warnings from History

In some respects one could view this book as a single warning repeated 64 times.

Review: The Bookshop, The Draper, The Candlestick Maker: A History of the High Street

Taking readers from the Middle Ages to (more or less) the present day, Gray charts how the places where we do our shopping and what we buy have changed over the centuries.

Review: Extraordinary Learning For All

As a source of potential ideas and inspiration, the book could be very useful indeed.