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ICT is increasingly used in education and in the business and leisure industries. This means children have access to ICT in many different aspects of their lives. It is essential, therefore, that we give them a wide variety of opportunities to explore how the technology can support them in their learning. For example, while pupils are using a desk top publishing package to create a school newspaper they are also developing their ability to communicate more effectively. This provides both a context and a meaning for the ICT activity. Taking the IT out of context and teaching IT skills separately, not only decontextualises ICT but also places additional burdens on curriculum time. The use of ICT therefore should be a meaningful part of an activity where it is used to consolidate or extend pupils' learning. Some examples of how ICT can be used to support pupils learning are: word processors to write up and present their work; using a spreadsheet to enter their data collected as part of an investigation, creating charts, and interpreting the results); using a database to enter data collected as part of an investigation, interrogating the database by searching and sorting, in order to answer questions to help solve problems which form part of the investigation; using hypermedia to write up, lay out and present their work for publication on the Internet; using the Internet and CD-ROMs to help with research during an investigation.

There is a second fallacy, which is also very important, which we might call the miracle transformation fallacy -- i.e., the notion that, if we could get little green laptops into children's hands, it would miraculously transform their lives. This fallacy falls within an approach known as "media determinism," the notion that a particular media or technology will automatically have a certain effect no matter what context it is deployed in.

He found that the single strongest factor determining whether students received a positive benefit from school use of technology was the children's socioeconomic status (SES), with low-SES children tending to see test scores go down with computer use and high-SES children tending to see them go up.

Wenglinsky's data suggests that this is in part due to the differential ways computers are used by teachers of high- and low-SES students.