Personal observations: Tablets/e-readers are great for schools. There are plenty of DRM-free e-books. Instead of buying crates of books, you can just buy some

Personal observations: Tablets/e-readers are great for schools. There are plenty of DRM-free e-books. Instead of buying crates of books, you can just buy some files and them copy them to all the e-readers on the school network. I've never been able to manage physical flash-card decks, but once I got a smartphone I started using spaced repetition system (SRS) flash-card apps, which can organize (probably) millions of flash-cards and show them to you in the most optimal way for exploiting the long-term memory. I've learned over 3,000 Arabic, Japanese, and Korean words combined, thanks to SRS flash-card apps. And in this day-and age where pretty much everyone is a network/system administrator (they just don't know it) it's important for kids to learn how to really use a real computer. The most useful thing I learned in my digital media class was how to organize files. I've never met an employer or coworker who could maintain a neat filesystem, even though an untamed Downloads directory would often be the source of their computer troubles. There is a huge opportunity for these technologies to make schools better. But at the same time, that opportunity has been here for over a decade now. One more observation: american public schools have horrible taste in software.