noblegiraffe - glad to hear access to school wifi is not the same as access to wifi at home! I get the feeling a lot of schools feel stuck between wanting to use useful technology now available to lots of children, and not being able to stipulate that all children must have it, as it is not remotely affordable for all, nor is it affordable to most schools to purchase and maintain such technology themselves. I think if intelligently used in a classroom it could be great, but would hate its use as a gimmick.
Being entirely honest about it, this technology is NOT cheap - the gadget may be, comparatively, given what it does, but maintaining it, ensuring it is kept up to date, paying network providers, keeping it and its data secure and uncorrupted, dealing with security breaches and physical theft, replacing it on a regular basis as it rapidly becomes obsolete, that is all time consuming, wasteful and expensive - we may be saving on paper (not that I think we really are), but we're not doing any of the other resources on earth much good. Besides which, this austerity government is never going to fund schools becoming more technological in a useful way, it will probably instead allow an ever accelerating division between those who can afford to keep up with technology and those who can't. And of those using the technology, only a tiny proportion have any meaningful understanding of it, yet like idiot lemmings we all embrace it, anyway. Why we all want to link absolutely everything up in a virtual world that then becomes more important to us all than the real world, to the extent that our national security is threatened by it (let alone our personal identities), I'm not entirely sure. But hey - I'm a secret luddite. 