> included Math Blasters
This type of practice has been shown to be harmful compared to conventional math practice.
> Oregon Trail
Oregon Trail was great. The dozens of hours I spent playing Big Top, One on One, Lode Runner, Pipe Dream, Test Drive I, etc, in schools--- less so.
And even for Oregon Trail, you got most of the value out of a couple of playthroughs. And mostly it's to learn "life on the frontier was hard" and "it's fun to shoot buffalo." You could have basically the same fun and more learning with a classroom-scale simulation.
(Rocky's Boots was fantastic, too).
> things like Duo Lingo.
Things like Duolingo, MathCounts Trainer, etc-- they have limited educational value but there's a huge subpopulation of students who will become addicted to them and use them in amounts that are well past the point of diminishing returns and a distraction to their learning overall.
> Where do you think it went wrong and what kinds of products are you talking about?
There's also a big tendency as instructors to pick up things like Kahoot/Quizizz/Khan and just give them to your class instead of actively instructing. It's easy. It takes little prep.
Small amounts of these things with adequate supervision can absolutely enrich the educational environment and provide feedback on how things are going. But they are overused and harm is readily observable. Not to mention that you need to be vigilant as a hawk to prevent cyberbullying, gaming, and abuse in alternate tabs.
There's a zillion edtech vendors who tell you they can sell you something to make your classroom run better. But in the end, the way a school really works is based on a social relationship between the students and the instructor, and excessive use of technology gets in the way of this. And when I say "excessive", I really mean "more than a little bit."