The Chalkboard's Energetic New Cousin

Ultimately, a local company donated Sterling Middle's first board, and this year the Loudoun County system's math supervisor, Cheryl Wimer, purchased nine for the school's math department.

"We wanted to get our test scores up," said Katrina S. Smith, a technology resource teacher at the school, which posted some of the county's lowest Standards of Learning test scores in the 2004-05 academic year.

Preston Coppels, director of instructional services for the Loudoun system, said he is trying to make sure that every school in the county has one or two whiteboards.

Cost is the primary barrier to acquiring the boards, said Nancy Knowlton, president and co-chief executive of Smart Technologies, the Calgary, Alberta-based inventor and vendor of the SMARTboard, a brand name for one of the interactive whiteboards. She said some schools have held bake sales or walkathons to purchase the equipment.

The market has grown faster in England, where the government has set aside 50 million pounds -- nearly $92 million -- to help schools buy interactive whiteboards as part of a larger effort to ramp up technology in classrooms, Knowlton said.

Schools make up about 60 percent of Smart Technologies' customers, but with faster Internet connections and the development of such tools as Web animation, the interactive boards have more and more applications. Many companies use them for video conferencing, and National Basketball Association teams have bought them so coaches can replay video of games and use electronic markers to draw plays, Knowlton said.

Back in the science classroom, Ivory flashed through a slideshow of images that he had found online documenting the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina: school buses floating in water, the Superdome missing swaths of the rubber sheeting that once covered its roof, a broken bridge.

While viewing an aerial photograph of New Orleans, Ivory asked Lauren Hemphill, 11, to outline the streets -- which now look like canals -- with an electronic marker.

"It's not just like reading out of book," Lauren said later about the day's lesson. "You actually get to see what you're learning about."