They should be considered as such, not as ends or entities valued in and of themselves. But only if they are readily available, if teachers and students know how to use them, and, most important, if they consistently work. Just as one would analyze the need for tools in a woodshop, those creating the technological infrastructure of a school must consider what tools are needed for what purposes, what quantities of various tools will be most efficient, what quality levels are sufficient but not excessive for various activities, and how to make sure that everything is always in good working condition. One issue that is changing rapidly is the question of which hardware platform a school should use. Students readily seem to understand that it is the pattern of the process, not the external specifics of the machinery or software, that counts.
Students are our most underutilized resource.
In an older, agrarian age, students knew they had real and valuable work to perform. Today, many child-development experts and sociologists speculate that some of the problems of modern adolescence may originate in the simple feeling of being unneeded and unable to do anything meaningful. One cannot help but ask how much capability has been wasted over the years by confining students' output to work sheets and multiple-choice quizzes. The lack of technical expertise in the country has affected all the high-tech industries, which have publicly acknowledged they are thousands of appropriately trained employees short. Nowhere is that shortage more apparent than in our school systems.