My wife is a secondary school German and French teacher here in the UK.
Her school has a very tech heavy setup, with smart-boards in all the classrooms and all the kids have netbooks.
She really loves the smart-boards, they are incredibly useful because they allow her to use much richer teaching material much more easily than in the past, mixing video, audio, and even letting her create interactive games for the whole class.
The netbooks on the other hand are much less useful. In a class of 30 the odds of all the kids remembering to bring them, and all of them working properly is pretty small. They get broken and lost or infected with viruses. The school's IT team have done a really good job, but with 1200 students it's a sisyphean task to keep them all running.
Don't get me wrong, I think the kids having the netbooks has been a good thing overall, but it's not a magic bullet.
But most importantly the use of the new tech has been driven by the teaching staff, not imposed on them from above, so what they have actually serves an educational purpose.
Politicians should stay out of the minutia of teaching and let teachers and school mangement get on with it. Government should stick to just making sure that the results are good, and intervening where necessary, not ruling by dictat.