An article in the Boston Globe raises questions about Maine's huge investment in laptops for every seventh and eighth grader, pointing to a study that claims that a similar technology investment in Israel led to a decline in mathematics performance.
The article makes a good point that when assessing the impact of large investments in technology, we should consider the opportunity cost of spending the money on other things. The researchers cited in the piece suggest that the money spent in Israel, and also in Maine, would have been better spent on a proven benefit like reduced class sizes. That's a legitimate attack; here in the Seattle area, there have been several teachers strikes this fall, and one of the (many) issues that arose was that teachers saw their district spending lots of money to replace two- to three- year old laptops -- which still worked just fine -- instead of raising teacher salaries.
However, I have two major concerns with studies that try to assess technology impact on this scale. First, evaluating the impact of technology investment without looking closely at how it is used makes no sense. Unless we know how the computers were used (or not used), we can't really understand whether the investment made sense. Was suitable software available? Did teachers have the opportunity to learn about effective ways to use the computers? Any study of the impact of technology really needs to look closely at these issues, rather than making blanket statements about the impact of computers.
Second, technology changes of this scope need time before they are evaluated. Often it's assumed that as long as we give teachers an inservice day to learn about computers, we've provided enough training, and we can look at what teachers do during that academic year as the litmus test for the impact of technology. That's ridiculous. Researchers who work closely with teachers on innovative uses of technology have documented that it often takes two to three years for teachers to reach a comfort level with technology, and that learning continues to improve over that period. Even if teachers receive suitable up-front training with the technology, everything they do that first year is going to be new to them -- throughout the year, they will be figuring out how the technology relates to where they are in the curriculum right now. It is only in their second year that they have sufficient experience to start integrating technology use into their teaching practice more effectively.
This suggests that any examination of the role of technology in learning needs to look closely at the specific nature of its use, and to study that use for more than one year.
9:51:49 AM 
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