"Books will soon be obsolete in the schools. Our school system will be completely changed in 10 years." -- Thomas Edison, 1913 Sound familiar? Ninety-nine years later, we are hearing nearly verbatim today. Educational technology is a wonderful addition to learning, and to our world, but it does not and will not replace the process of learning or the planning of teaching. Technology will also never replace the need to be literate. Students will always need to be able to read and write. And it's essential that they are able to do both incredibly well.

To help our students become writers, we need to write side by side with them.

Discovery’s Techbook series is cloud-based, meaning students can access the materials from wherever they have an internet connection; the company says that’s because not all school districts have the funds to give every student his or her own device. The Techbooks are also platform-agnostic to work with whatever hardware a district or student might have—iPads, tablets, mobile devices, laptops, or desktops.

Jobs believes this was because sales and profits became the priority. When Jobs returned, he shifted the focus back to innovative products, and profits followed. [Could the analogy in education be focusing on test scores rather than on teaching and learning?]

The problem is not with the teachers, but with the very definition of 'media literacy' itself. What is it, really? Can we swap the term out with 'digital learning' or 'ed tech' or 'culturally relevant education'? If so, all these terms are essentially meaningless. A student learning how to use an iPad in the classroom is not the same as a student asking critical questions of the messages in television. One is about using the media; the other is about analyzing it. These skills are as different as reading and writing. Before we can take any steps toward a national media curriculum (like the UK has had for a long time), we need to come to a consensus about the meaning of these words. If the average American can easily articulate the difference between reading and writing, he should also be able to quickly explain why we need media in the classroom. Only then can our students get the forward-thinking education that they deserve.

But those schools and classrooms that have embraced mobile devices have seen them as a catalyst for change in teaching, learning, and assessment, says Julie Evans, the chief executive officer of the Irvine, Calif.-based Project Tomorrow, a national education nonprofit group that promotes technology use in the classroom. "The access of having a [mobile] device in your hand changes the way that classroom environment feels," she says. "Students are walking around with the devices, doing things to get them out of the structured environment of the traditional school."