Ensuring a return on instruction

The chapter uses PISA as the imperative for a broader approach to technology. While the PISA testing is geared towards life skills and inquiry it still is a series of closed questions based on what the writers of the test believe to be important.
A student, who has not been exposed to the 'content' of the individual questions still has to apply skills to respond but is again limited by their existing knowledge of the field. The skills of being able to discern the correct potential responses from the 'red herrings' is something taught not something intuitively discovered through creative or explorative uses of technology.
There are billions of potential topics and questions for such a survey. The complexity offered, in the first PISA sample question for reading, involves comprehension of a graph, understanding of timelines that extend millennia into the past, interpretation of the purpose of the text and generalisation of the material to make informed predictions. Each of the basic skills listed (clearly not exhaustively listed) requires significant training and repetition before a student would be able to generalise the skills into situations where the content is foreign but accessible using a technique.
PISA requires a comprehensive approach incorporating all the disciplines rather than 'siloing'. The example above requires considerable mathematical comprehension apart from language skills and, in this question's case an general knowledge of geology.
On page 85 the text discusses the idea that we need to 'move past these types of trainings' in reference to technology based workshops. I agree with this. Without these workshops as a forerunner to a more comprehensive/ creative and intuitive use of technology this latter goal is not achievable. We cannot assume that students will gather the requisite skills through osmosis. 'A rolling stone gathers no moss.' There is a significant need for skill acquisition prior to 'rolling on' to greater knowledge and use of technology as a tool for learning.