http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/22/AR2009042204036.html?hpid=topnews/
Here is a an idea – not as pointless as it first might seem – picture this, a classroom full of kids busy concentrating on the stimulating worksheet that you the teacher have just given them. Their headsets are attached and their ping pong balls are floating. By scanning the room the teacher can quickly identify who has stopped concentrating and dropped the ball so to speak. Perhaps this could be just the sort of 21st century tool for monitoring student achievement that the government is looking for 
I have recently finished reading Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. I really enjoyed it. There are some interesting thoughts in it for the education sector, like the fact that given 3 seconds of video of a lecturer, with no audio, a group of students came up with an identical evaluation of the lecturers effectiveness as a teacher as another group of students that did the evaluation after being taught for a semester. Universities could save thousands on their course evaluation processes by getting a group of random people to evaluate 3 second videos of the lecturing staff rather than analysing thousands of end of semester evaluation forms
With numerous examples Gladwell shows that with flashes of insight humans can make split second decisions that are sound and reliable – particularly when backed by years of experience in a particular field. But he notes that
“This insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out”
In some ways it backs up the ideas of extreme/agile programming which in a lot of ways operates around the split second hunches of the programmers as the cards are shuffled around the table, rather than the endless analysis and documentation of the waterfall methods.
If you are someone that feels you need to thoroughly research a topic and write a detailed bibliography in APA format before you can even think about making a sound decision then I suggest you read this book.
Here is something that every teacher should have on their iphone or ipod touch.
http://theragis.us/
Well done Tom.