[n0us]

I was the head tour guide at my boarding school and a question that came up with almost every single parent was "where are the smart boards?" They (falsly) assumed that adding technology to the learning experience in every possible place is a good thing. For one, the boards are very expensive and two, for something like an English class they add next to nothing. The only place I saw them being valuable was in the science classrooms but even then there was little if no advantage over using a projector and a whiteboard. Over use of tech can be distracting for the teachers as well, they had a pilot system of using tablet computers in conjunction with projectors in my Calc class and the professor just geeked out over all the colors he could show notes in and all the stuff he could do with it but it really distracted from the actual math. In college many of my classes forbade the use of laptops or highly discouraged it because a few students always just end up surfing Facebook which is distracting to everyone in the room. I found I always retained the information better when I took notes by hand.