First-and-10 for tech in the classroom

[Commentary] Analysts are famous for "reading between the lines" of company earnings reports. But it doesn't take years of experience to connect two points in Apple Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer's remarks about iPads to get a glimpse of our future classrooms: "And this football season, nearly every team in the NFL use iPads as playbooks, replacing their traditional three-ring paper binders. In the education market, schools continue to choose iPad and the great content available across apps, books and courses." Football players, airline employees from the cabin staff to the folks doing check in, sales managers at healthcare companies -- the list goes on.

Schools are lurching their way toward wired classrooms. Google's executive chairman, Eric Schmidt, has said that there were "5 exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization through 2003 but that much information is now created every two days." An "Exabyte" is 1 billion gigabytes -- an unfathomable amount of data. Pundits quibble about the numbers, but they don't disagree about this: More data is coming. And if our kids are going to flourish in a world in which data surrounds them like air, they will need every tool at their disposal to make sense of it. Just like football players are chucking three-ring binders for tablets, our schools will too.

[Betsy Corcoran is CEO of EdSurge, the leading news and information service on education technology]