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One of the tasks is to educate young people about the various forms of writing and teach them when it is appropriate to use one over another, Wise said.

As an example, students today can more freely revise their work, not bound by pen and paper that makes revising a tedious and clumsy process.

"Computers enable people to be more reflective about their writing," Wise said. "When a student is writing an essay and is not sure it is structured right to make a good argument, the text can be moved around and the different versions can be compared.

Using a computer can help support higher literacy skills."

The ability to publish work also adds an incentive that wasn't there when the essay you handed in on a piece of paper didn't go beyond the teacher's desk. Today's students can blog and tweet; class projects create online content that can be viewed by people around the globe. That ability to reach a wider audience imposes its own incentives to create good work and not just a few throwaway paragraphs to pass a course.

He points out that children before the age of seven or eight need to be supervised in using technology, and while advances have been made in the use of technology in education, he says, "We still have a long ways to go."

Most school districts within B.C. don't really have a technology plan that is associated with the curriculum,

Technology as used for "edutainment" is gaining more ground in homes than in schools, with parents often the ones who will outfit their homes with computing devices or equip their children with iPods or smartphones.

Today's toddlers can read books on an iPad that bring the touch features of a traditional print book: they can flip pages and read it sitting on their laps in the back seat of the car, not only at a desktop or laptop computer. The digital version also brings enhancements, from Alice literally tumbling down the rabbit hole on the screen in Alice in Wonderland to books that read aloud and let children take part in the story creation and other features.