That can create an illusion that schools are improving, when other forces really are at play, according to Todd Oppenheimer of San Francisco, author of "The Flickering Mind: Saving Education From the False Promise of Technology." (Information on the book can be found online at flickering mind.net.)"It's a deceptive circle," Oppenheimer said. "You aim for the test. You prepare for it. You do better. And everybody thinks that learning is rising. But really, teachers are only getting more comfortable with the test."Oppenheimer writes skeptically of schools that claim the technology is "just a tool.""It isn't," he said. "It is much more powerful. It completely reorients for a youngster how work is done, how quickly perfection can be achieved, and what effort they need to put in to achieve excellence. It teaches them that they don't need to put in much. The machine does it."Computers are designed to be a consumer device, to make our lives simpler, easier and quicker," he continued. "That's not the main job of schools. Schools should slow things down and take things apart."When I've gone to schools where kids are doing very low-tech activities, their appreciation for the work they do is fivefold greater than you see on the faces of children doing computer work," Oppenheimer said. "When they're knitting or carving wood, they get it. When you have to spend weeks making something, you understand what making something is. When you can do it with the click of a button, you do not understand what making something is."

by Dan Fost of the Chronicle: chools that place too much emphasis on technology, particularly in the early grades, risk diverting resources from other critical aspects of education, such as art and physical activity, critics say."As we talk to people in the computer industry, we're hearing that young people don't have the same degree of creativity that earlier generations had. And they don't have the same social capacities," said Joan Almon, coordinator of the Alliance for Childhood, a nonprofit group that has posted two reports questioning the emphasis on technology at its Web site, allianceforchildhood. org. "The screen is really consuming childhood."