Walk into most any classroom in most any school in America today and you'll walk into a time warp where the basic tools of learning have not changed in decades. Teachers simply have not embraced the computer as a basic tool of learning. However, I suspect an important failure of computers and related technology may have as much to do with how schools actually operate, and our assumptions about how they should operate. The educational industry is largely a delivery mechanism. However, in the average K-12 environment, harnessing technology to this paradigm has not had any notable effect on improving learning.
Computers are great analytical tools.
Large segments of our society use them to collect, produce, manipulate, analyze, synthesize, transform, and report information in a vast variety of contexts and formats. Today, we find ourselves in the best of times, and in the worst of times. We see real evidence around us every day that the World Wide Web is actually beginning to change our lives. However, the schools are still stuck in an outdated paradigm more akin to the 19th Century than to the 21st. These teachers need to know how to use various technologies to shape and process and manage information, to look for relationships, trends, anomolies, and details, which can not only answer questions, but create questions as well.