Today, Layne's IM subject line states, "Teachers quit more than students;)" He must be working on his dissertation at the moment. Yes, in the United States half of teachers leave in five years. Though the statistic is startling to most people, the element of truth should be motivating people who work in the technology industry to start doing more to help fix it.
It's fairly easy to imagine classrooms of students using Ultra-Mobile PCs along with teachers using Tablet PCs to make the classroom experience more efficient, organized, creative, and all aimed at learning. We can understand the benefit and researchers are collecting data supporting that there really is a student learning benefit. We're well on the road to improving the tool set -- software -- also.
As education and pen-and-touch computers become more and more connected, the software repository is also growing. Today there are several academic software packages optimized for Tablet PCs or Ultra-Mobile PCs. Here is a list of some of those products:

• abletFactory OneNote Teacher's Toolkit
• Agilix GoBinder
• Academy123
• Blackboard Backpack
• DyKnow Vision
• HeuLab Fun with Construction, Fun with Mind Book & more
• Inshperion Learning
• JumpingMinds MathPractice SkillPak and InkGestures
• Microsoft Education Pack for Tablet PC
• Microsoft OneNote
• Microsoft Student
• Tegrity Campus
• xThink MathCalculator and MathJournal

Then there are great horizontal applications tuned for pen and ink that can be used by those in academics, such as Mindjet MindManager, FranklinCovey PlanPlus, forms for evaluations and daily work.
There is also a whole set of academic software driven by people in higher-education. You can find more at the Microsoft Research RFP awards lists from 2004, 2005, and 2006. Here are a few examples:

• Brown University The Music Notepad for Tablet PC (with source code)
• Brown University MathPad(2) (current project)
• Brown University STEMPad and ChemPad (current projects)
• University of California, Riverside AC-SPARC
• University of Washington Classroom Presenter (with source code)
• UCSD Ubiquitous Presenter (with source code)

From the practical side, there are gaps that still need to be filled. Opportunities for software companies to help teachers be learner focused, organized, creative, and un-burdened by levels of system complexity. Think of what a teacher does the minute she or he steps into the classroom and the hours of planning required before that daily presentation can even begin. Consider how connected students, parents, teachers, and administrators can be about what content students are learning, where difficulties are and need to be addressed. Little things like role call appear simple, since it is just marks on a piece of paper(s). However, the back-end mounds of paper processing and redundancy can be reduced.
If you are interested in learning more about the ways technology can help address education challenges and those things yet to do, be sure to listen to the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit Webcast (transcript here) from this summer.
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