ABSTRACT
I am writing this on a small laptop computer on a train. I have Wi-Fi and have just gone through my emails. A three-year-old child is sitting opposite me playing on her mother’s smartphone, and what is obviously a rugby team are noisily crowding together to have their photo taken on a tablet. It looks like the photographer is sending the picture to his social network site for the others to pick up later. On my laptop I am reading an article about Google Glass and the advantages of ‘augmented reality’. However, I also read that despite the fact that we are immersed in technology in our daily lives apparently young children in England will be stopped from using calculators in their mathematics tests.1 In fact, the reason that I am on the train is that I am returning home after watching some lessons in a school where the use of mobile phones has been banned. There seems a mismatch between how new technologies are increasingly a part of every-day life, and how we learn about and use them in school.
