In OECD countries a student spent, on average, two hours a day online in 2012, and 25 minutes of that time was at school.

Information technology is great, but it may not be making kids smarter, according to a new report showing that increased computer use in classrooms leads to lower test scores.

The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) researchers compared data from 2009 and 2012.

As you might expect, the number of computers in schools and households increased in those three years, as did the time kids spent online.

In OECD countries a student spent, on average, two hours a day online in 2012, and 25 minutes of that time was at school.

That figure undoubtedly has increased since then, given the proliferation of cheaper mobile devices and laptops.

In New Zealand, the reports showed children were spending about 25 minutes with computers in the class each day.

Education systems in Australia, the Netherlands, Denmark and Norway were the leaders in integrating tech.

In Australia, kids spent almost an hour a day online at school. In Denmark, 35 percent had access to school-provided tablets.

Yet, there are some outliers: Japan, China and even tech-loving South Korea, where the share of students using computers at school declined to 42 per cent in 2012 from 63 per cent in 2009.

They may be on to something. The OECD study found that the use of computers was negatively correlated with improvements in student performance on maths tests.

And this doesn't apply only to maths: In countries with higher numbers of students who frequently browse the Internet for schoolwork at school, reading performance tends to improve more sluggishly than in others, or even to get worse.

The decline in performance becomes especially noticeable in countries where students often use online chats for schoolwork. They "may be missing out on other more effective learning activities", the report suggests.

And less computer use in class doesn't mean kids aren't comfortable with technology: According to the report, Korean and Singaporean students are better than anyone else at internet navigation because they are "already proficient in higher-order thinking and reasoning processes in other domains".

The general problem is that teachers often aren't very adept at using technology themselves.

Like most of us, they picked up their skills as they went along, and they often are no better than students at coming up with productive ways to use computers. Both the kids and their teachers are wandering in the dark.

"Schools and education systems are, on average, not ready to leverage the potential of technology," the report said.