A fascinating read from Michael Trucano, of World Bank’s blog EduTech. Big educational laptop and tablet projects — Ten countries to learn from. Many countries across the world have been exploring the 1 laptop per child policy for a number of years now but what Michael observes is that this has been overtaken by a tablets per child policy and in particular Android tablets. With more publishers linking with tech companies to offer online versions of their textbooks, and offering substantial discounts at the same time, you can see why many educational providers are jumping at the chance to plough a lot of money into buying devices for their learners. However, Michael raises a very important point in his summary:

All too often, the related question being asked is not ‘what challenges are we trying to solve, and what approaches and tools might best help us solve them?’, but rather, ‘we know what our technology ‘solution’ is, can you please help us direct it at the right problems?’

It’s definitely worth a read if you have 5 minutes or so. And is of particular interest to those re-defining ELT content for mobile devices.