My wife is a teacher so I speak with some 2nd hand experience here.

[tl;dr: 1) Innovation does happen, it just doesn't always involve technology or computers. 2) The system punishes those who innovate.]

Rant 1:

She is constantly innovating in her classroom. She is always looking for new and better ways to capture students attention and inspire them.

She is head of the department and is also innovating within her department. She works together with her team (currently 3 including herself) and often runs things like joint lessons so experience and best practises can be shared amongst the team.

However, she is not a techie so her innovations are in teaching styles, delivery, activities, content and management and not technology. I think sometimes as techies we can be quite arrogant in assuming that innovation must always involve technology.

Rant 2:

But the biggest problem in teaching is the system. The focus of the system is so heavily centred around grades that sometimes they forget we are dealing with children. The system encourages uninnovative parrot style education and memorisation of past papers so the pupils can reel off a bunch of model answers to keep the numbers looking good. So those who innovate are often rewarded with poorer grades because the exams focus on blind memorisation with no thought.

So much is expected of individual teachers that those who want to innovate don't have the time. She currently starts work at 7.45 when I drop her at school. She leaves at 5.30 when I collect her. She does an additional 2-3 hours most evenings and 3-6 hours on a Sunday. She works around 70% of the time in every halfterm/holiday break with the exception of the summer when we try to get a solid 2 weeks away somewhere. Add on the frequent parents evenings, open days and after school events.

The goal posts are frequently changed at both a governmental level, a local authority level and at an individual school level (sometimes conflicting). Deadlines are frequently imposed or changed with little or no warning. Unlike in my industry where if a request is made someone must choose to drop some existing work to fit it in, they are frequently expected to meet additional requirements without any reduction elsewhere.

She has been a teacher for 5 years and so far the syllabus in her subject has changed every single year. This means every year time is wasted re-writing schemes of work to fit a new syllabus, re-writing mock exams, re-writing resources and lesson plans. Some churn is obviously good to continuously improve, but when the required churn is so high there is no time to make improvements.

Lets add to this the constant pressure of demanding parents who see (or hear about) every innovation, and any that doesn't fit their own personal mantra for education they complain (and too much power is given to parents who complain). It's like having an additional 30 pairs of bosses per project each with their own totally different opinions on how their child should be educated (and they all seem to think they are experts and their children are angels).

Teaching breaks the spirit of even the most passionate rather than rewarding those who are innovating it crushes them under a mountain of work and unrealistic expectations.

It's the system that has to change first to reward the right kinds of behaviour. Every successive government seems to think they are the experts on education and their changes are forced through so quickly little time or consideration is given to implementation or if they will actually work.

[UK based btw]