ACT students went back to school this week and, in crucial ways, many of them will actually have to ''power down'' their potential when they are in class.
It's one of the conundrums of the 21st century. Our kids can use the digital world like we mastered the microwave, but we make them leave their skills and technology at the classroom door.
Whilst some teachers are achieving wonderful results, the majority are still having grave difficulties in accessing and effectively using technologies in the classroom.
Failing to address that is doing our students a disservice and one that will cost us down the track. We're also short-changing the many thousands of teachers who want to transform their classrooms into modern learning environments but don't have the skills or support to do it.
These teachers made their position loud and clear recently in a survey run by education.au, which was set up by state, territory and Federal governments to help integrate technology in teaching and learning.
Of the 1124 respondents across Australia, 85 per cent use the internet for work-related purposes at least once a day.
Nearly all (96 per cent) used search engines like Google and Yahoo, while 45 per cent tapped into online communities (email discussion lists, web forums etc), 39 per cent used learning management systems (eg Blackboard and Moodle), and 33 per cent employed subject or discipline data bases (such as research database EBSCO or the medical specialist site MedLine).
But many weren't able to use the internet as effectively as they would like, and nearly half had trouble with poor infrastructure, bandwidth, equipment reliability, accessibility of logins or permissions.
Forty per cent found their internet access was either blocked or filtered, and one in five had limited access even to computers or internet connections per se.
We're not talking about ''wish-list'' technology here the sort of world we dreamt about as kids when we watched the Jetsons or Star Trek. This is now technology, and the way we use it will be crucial in how we compare with other countries in just a few years.
Through the survey we heard of a school with 20 computers to be used by 12 different classes, and of a typical classroom with a couple of power points (with several extension cords and power boards running from them) and maybe one computer for the entire class to share.
On the other hand, we also heard of a school in South Australia, only seven years old, with smart boards in every classroom and laptop computer suites for the students.
Whilst one school did not even have its own intranet, another school went to the expense of subscribing to specialist database EBSCO for its teachers to use.
Access and expertise are going to be key issues and we're going to have to get smarter about the way we deal with them.
At present we're ruled by a combination of fear about cyber bullying and predatory behaviour, issues relating to data security, and old-fashioned reluctance to allow students to bring gadgets like mobile phones, iPods and laptops into the classrooms for learning.
We're still insisting that anything they use for fun must be the opposite of learning, instead of realising how they engage with the outside world is critical to how they'll work in future.
Our fear is that we're not only putting kids off learning, but we'll start to put at risk the political will to fund a digital education revolution, especially if it looks like it's not producing any outcomes.
Greg Black is chief executive of Adelaide-based education.au