Interactive whiteboards are appearing in a growing number of classrooms nationwide. They're also proving their worth in reaching all students.

It's a cold and dreary Thursday morning in Baltimore. The kind of morning that begs even the most enthusiastic students to stay in bed with the covers pulled up tight around their heads, preferring the incessant beeping of their alarm clocks to the thought of braving the elements for yet another day at school.

Outside the Cardinal Gibbons School, a private Catholic institution about five miles south of Baltimore's wind-swept Inner Harbor, traffic blurs by, filling Jack Ames' third-story classroom with a mechanical drone-- background noise to the random chat-chit that accompanies his first-period geometry students as they trickle in one by one, many of them yawning, trying desperately to shake out the cobwebs before setting to work on the day's lesson: defining the value of an isosceles trapezoid.

It's 8:45 a.m. And his boys look tired. But the veteran teacher isn't worried. He's got the perfect tool to get his students' wheels turning. Positioned against the far wall is a plain white projection screen--Ames' empty canvas. Not five feet away, the teacher stands behind his computer and presses a button. A second later, the screen comes to life--and a dozen heads turn on a swivel.

Forget about archaic overhead projectors. Ames' secret weapon is one of the hottest educational technologies to have found its way into classrooms in recent years: an interactive digital whiteboard from Canadian company SMART Technologies Inc.

The SMART Board is one of several types of electronic, interactive whiteboards appearing in more and more schools, as today's teachers look to bridge the gap between cutting-edge devices and traditional chalkboard instruction.

"I think the biggest thing is that it's a motivator," said Ames in support of the board, which he uses almost every day to cover topics ranging from the previous night's homework assignments to upcoming tests and daily lessons.

And he's not alone. Interactive whiteboards are now present in 28 percent of all K-12 public schools in the United States, according to Market Data Retrieval's "Technology in Education 2004" report. High schools are more likely to have the devices than elementary or middle schools. There are also major differences across states, the report says, with 58 percent of the schools in Missouri and Idaho using the devices, compared with only 12 percent in Iowa.

Advocates of the technology say there's a good reason for the boards' surging popularity among K-12 schools: They engage students with vastly different kinds of abilities and learning styles. And that's an increasingly important feature in a world of tougher academic standards and higher expectations for all students, regardless of ability.

At Cardinal Gibbons, eight of the school's 24 classrooms are equipped with the technology, which acts as a sort of digital dry-erase board, allowing teachers and students to write on the projection screen as they would a chalkboard with the aid of a specially engineered digital pen--or even just a finger.