Touch screens replacing chalk and white boards throughout state

PHOENIX (AP) -- Classrooms were equipped with chalkboards for decades. And then white boards with colorful markers came along.

Now, classrooms across the Phoenix metropolitan area and elsewhere in the world are being equipped with touch-sensitive computers screens that educators predict will render chalk and white boards obsolete.

The screen, called a SMART Board, can do anything a computer can do. Students can use their fingertips to trace the Panama Canal, and with the tap of a stylus, teachers can pull up video of this morning's shuttle launch or the California Gold Rush of 1848.

A dozen manufacturers make interactive white boards, but a Canadian firm, SMART Technologies of Calgary, Alberta, made them first in 1991 and is a leading seller. They cost about $1,200 each.

About 4,000 are being used in Arizona schools.

In the Phoenix Union High School District, 30 interactive white boards hang in classrooms. Camelback High will be outfitted with 55 of them this summer, and a new high school in Laveen will have one in every classroom.

There are 28 SMART Boards in Paradise Valley High School. And, in the Phoenix Elementary School District, there is at least one at 15 schools.

"It has absolutely revolutionized the way we teach," said Mia DeLaRosa, a sixth-grade teacher at Sevilla West School in Phoenix. "This kind of technology gets (students) fired up about learning, and there is nothing more important about that."