Control needed badly

Image by Development Works Photos via Flickr

Say, I have an idea -- take the same money and put parents and volunteers and older kids and mentors with the kids to select and read books with the kids in the control group for the same amount of time that the other kids are playing with techno-teacher.

Not only are you likely to get better comprehension (the point of reading, after all) but you'll get a huge host of benefits that the techno-toys not only don't provide but positively negate.

But hey, the ed biz is fast becoming just a way to route money to big contractors to "prepare" kids for the expensive testing regimes provided by other big contractors. So techno-teacher makes a certain amount of sense . . . after all, we wouldn't want to admit that all our spending on computers and techno-toys and TVs in schools is actually counterproductive (which it is).