Tell me why parents are still paying top $ for paper textbooks when we could have a National Curriculum via WWW?
(Some sort of WIKI available only to seniour teachers)
Could it be that the profits of Publishers are more important than quality education for our kids?
The net has such huge potential for massive improvement in education for vastly less cost. Rather than embrace this, our "leaders" are talking about commercial sponsorship of education. This is guarenteed to keep costs high and quality secondary.

Computer technology can enhance the educational process but will never in itself teach students to read and think which is and always will be the necessary foundation of a good education.

If you had two classes of students, both with similar reading ages at the beginning of a school year, and the first was allocated a certain amount of time each day for "messaging, mixing, mashing and moviemaking" on computers, while the second was given that same time reading good quality literature, I guarantee the reading age of the second group at the end of the year would be far higher than that of the the first. This in itself would lift the standards of achievement right across the curriculum and would mean that time spent on computers was far more valuable than it otherwise would have been.

Students will never benefit properly from the wealth of information available online if they haven't been taught to read and critically analyse first. It takes good teachers to do this, and in today's age they definitely need to make use of the best technology available to them, but their first resource should always be well written books.

Children need to read and think at a high level if they are to negotiate their way through the maze of rubbish available online. Connecting them to good books will always be the best as well as the easiest and most affordable way to achieve this.