(And How To Keep Them From Fouling Up Your YA Fiction) In 10 years, will anybody understand you if you say "fo shizzle" Will they stare blankly if you mention Britney Spears' buzz cut or Paris Hilton's jail time

Ms Preble is an award-winning teacher, a jazz singer and pianist, and the author of The Queen Geek Social Club and its just-published sequel Queen Geeks In Love (both available from Penguin Books)

When the computers at a school in Lake Oswego, Oregon, had to be turned off for four days because of a virus, students were bewildered about how to address a snail mail envelope These tech-savvy students could email, text, web browse, MySpace, and Google with great skill, but when the system went down, both students and teachers realized that technology is no longer a luxury, but a necessity—perhaps a necessity that serves to separate us rather than bring us together

One day when I had nothing to do (well, actually, I had a lot to do, but I didn't want to do any of it), I decided to play the Google game This is the one where you input your own name or something else into the field in quotes to see how many search results you get