If You Build It, They Will Come … and play games

Regular readers probably know by now that, whenever I hear a sentence beginning with "Wouldn't it be cool if …?," I either rev my capacity of skepticism up into high gear or run like hell in any available direction. Apparently, someone in the Los Angeles Unified School District decided the sentence should be:

Wouldn't it be cool if every student had an iPad?

This came down to investing about $1 billion to provide 650,000 students with iPads, all connected into a network of software apps that would become part of their educational activities. According to an Associated Press report that recently appeared, however, 300 of those students seemed more interested in getting through the security settings of that network, allowing them to get down to using the iPad for the purposes for which it had been intended, "tweeting, posting to Facebook and playing video games." That's what's cool about advanced technology in the classroom!