Where does technology fit?

Sometimes a chalkboard is all you need.

There is a lot of technology available for schools. Schools have large budgets, and tech companies can make a lot of money by selling complete systems to schools, school districts, or even entire ministries and departments. Most of this money is wasted and could be put to better use someplace else. We won't be advocating the iPad, shown above.

This is a contentious issue, because image sells. iPads in schools sell seats. We know this, but we believe that results sell better than image. Since we will be focusing on results, we will recommend only technology which gets results and which costs less than the equivalent non-tech solution for the same results.

Examples of these high-return initiatives include:

• e-Books that are free to redistribute and low-cost e-readers for students;
• Computer labs based on multi-seat or thin client technology;
• Webcams used as document cameras, instead of a proprietary solution'
• Free and low-cost cloud services'
• Open-source software solutions.

I hope that makes our position clear.

Since we are focusing on making private bilingual and international programs modern and, above all, profitable, technology needs to be used wisely, only where it reduces costs or makes