Two years ago the Los Angeles school board proudly announced a $1.3 billion project to roll out iPads in some of its more disadvantaged schools.
Now the contract has collapsed and the school board wants the money back from Apple and its partner, education publisher Pearson.
It seems the program’s big problem was the software with Pearson supplying a poor product that was unusable for students.
What we may well be seeing though is the end of the obsession politicians and education bureaucrats have with technology, something that ran ahead of teachers’ skills to use the tools and the capabilities of those tools – as we see with Pearson.
Perversely though this may be the time that education technology starts to flourish as the sector falls into what Gartner describes as the ‘pit of disillusionment.’