Teach­ers are using tech­nol­ogy in the class­room as a crutch, rather than a tool to increase their qual­ity of teach­ing, pro­poses José A. Bowen, Dean of the Mead­ows School of the Arts, and this is why he’s remov­ing com­put­ers from his classrooms.

Resis­tance was high, both from teach­ers and stu­dents, but research has linked bore­dom in class­rooms to poor test scores and lec­turer com­puter use to stu­dent boredom.

As Bowen says, it’s not so much about using tech­nol­ogy, but it’s about using it bet­ter:

More than any thing else, Mr. Bowen wants to dis­cour­age pro­fes­sors from using Pow­er­Point, because they often lean on the slide-display pro­gram as a crutch rather using it as a cre­ative tool. Class time should be reserved for dis­cus­sion, he con­tends, espe­cially now that stu­dents can down­load lec­tures online and find libraries of infor­ma­tion on the Web. When stu­dents reflect on their col­lege years later in life, they’re going to remem­ber chal­leng­ing debates and talks with their pro­fes­sors. Lively inter­ac­tions are what teach­ing is all about, he says, but those give-and-takes are dis­cour­aged by pre­set col­lec­tions of slides.