In the first of his two State of the Nation Addresses this year, President Cyril Ramaphosa laid out an ambitious vision for educational technology in South Africa. Every child should have access to digital textbooks on a tablet device by 2025, he said. History suggests that these kinds of promises have a tendency to come back to haunt politicians. Kenya, for example, has just ditched its ambitious one-laptop-per- child policy. Closer to home, Gauteng MEC for Education Panyaza Lesufi once promised all public schools in the province would be paperless by 2019 (they aren’t).

Yet the temptation to believe that technology can fix our broken education system and prepare students for life in the Fourth Industrial Revolution remains. But what is it that schools really want from technology? And what do those who have experience in the education sector think are the wise investments that should be made?