Finally, good news: The Department of Education is moving to computers.

Well, the move appears to be couched in enough bureaucratic deniability that if the Legislature and the governor dig out on funding, the Department of Education won’t look foolish.

Still the new DOE budget calls for equipping each public student with either a tablet or laptop by 2015, and training teachers to include both them and the computers in a modernization of teaching and doing away with textbooks.

Gov. Neil Abercrombie was first to call for going digital in his State of the State address so going forward should be a priority for the entire administration.

There is a lot to recommend giving all Hawaii students their own tablet or laptop. Today’s students are living in a digital world that few of us baby boomers even grasp.

Going digital makes a new world possible, and understanding that we rely on, work in and live in a digital world changes everything.

Reports are coming from Mumbai, X-rays from Cleveland, forecasts from Houston. You are either using the data, inventing ways of using the data or out of the game.

To live successfully today, most have already realized that jobs, except for portions of the service industry, will be based on the ability to move and do something with pictures, voices and huge amounts of data anywhere around the globe.

Medicine is rapidly becoming digitized, from your medical records, to getting treatments from specialists in New York or Boston.

Star-Advertiser education reporter Mary Vorsino wrote Wednesday that the DOE plan calls for spending $42 million over two years to launch the project that includes both hardware, software and teacher education.

Getting teachers up to speed and buying into the program is essential.

The DOE is wisely thinking about leasing the computer gear for three years, though even that may be too long a time period; remember, the now-antique iPad1 first came out in 2010 and now is in its fourth generation.

"Board of Education Chairman Don Horner stressed that it is still early in the budgetary process and that there will have to be discussions with the executive and legislative," Vorsino wrote.

She quoted Horner as saying: "I don’t think the nation has done analysis on the return on investment. We need to weigh that in relationship to all the other priorities in the department."

Of course you could also make the argument that books versus pieces of paper as tools for learning also needs more study.

Meanwhile, there is this news from US News & World Report that 53 percent of students in China say computers are integrated into their curriculum, compared to 29 percent of U.S. students.

Another US News report delves further into the debate regarding teaching and computers to note that today’s teacher is used to being the center of the classroom and the base of a "teacher-centric" education system.

This could change if the education programs come from software with progress measured by completed computer lessons. The question then is who is running the classroom.

"Now, the iPad allows us to put the responsibility of learning into the hands of the students," Joel Backon, director of academic technology at Choate Rosemary Hall, a coeducational boarding and day school in Connecticut, said in the magazine report.

This is sure to make the Hawaii State Teachers Association pout, but should not be enough to delay a good idea.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.