COVENTRY -- In at least one local school, the days of the traditional chalkboard are numbered.

This month, courtesy of Hewlett-Packard, Washington Oak Elementary School started using tablet PCs in five of its classroom. Picture a laptop computer without the keyboard; students and teachers write on the screen with a stylus, and an image of what's written is projected on an overhead screen.

Hewlett-Packard, the software and computer giant, annually awards high-technology equipment to schools under its "HP Technology for Teaching" initiative.

This year, Washington Oak was one of 130 public schools nationwide to share $4.5 million worth of equipment. It was awarded a $35,000 package that, besides the tablet PCs, included a multimedia projector, digital camera printer/scanner/copier and software.

Washington Oak, which enrolls 600 children from kindergarten to sixth-grade, was the only Rhode Island public school to garner a Hewlett-Packard award.

"We did a lot of research on technology-based educational materials," and trained the teachers in how to prepare a proposal, said principal Donna Raptakis. "The only way to get this [type of] technology is through grants."

Raptakis suggested that one reason Washington Oak was chosen is that it is the base for the system's special-education classes.

She said she is aggressively seeking other technology grants, with the goal of equipping every classroom.

For lessons yesterday, students in Deborah Kolling's third-grade class used the PC tablet, which lay on a small table in the center of the classroom.

Students individually completed various English exercises on the tablet, picking out punctuation, spelling and grammatical errors in a group of sentences and editing them. Kolling wrote the sentences in blue script, while the students made the corrections in red.

Once the lesson is done, the students get a printed copy, in their own handwriting, which gives them a sense of shared ownership in the completed product and helps the learning process, Kolling said.

"It's more engaging for them," said Kolling, a teacher for 28 years, 18 in Coventry. "The children will have a copy that is more personal. They are already invested here."

Student Kyle Willett, 8, appeared fascinated. When Kolling asked if Samantha Falkowski had found all the errors, Kyle jumped out of his seat and skipped over to the PC tablet to flag something his classmate missed.

"It's more fun. You get to solve problems using a laptop," he said.