As perhaps the world's largest information organisation, education stands to profit greatly from new information and communication technologies. This potential has translated into a great deal of development targeted at education -- unfortunately often accompanied by a great deal of overhyped claims. In this paper, I argue that many of these claims are in fact category errors and ignore fundamental problems facing education today. Moreover, new technology approaches are often driven by high-tech interests, rather than educationalists concerns. As an alternative, I present a layered framework, which integrates a bottom-up view of Information Technology usage and a top-down view of education. This conceptual framework helps identify appropriate and judicious use of new information technologies and clarify the kind of educational opportunities they support.