I could have told you this years ago, but the Institute of Education at my dear old University of London has published a study of interactive whiteboards which says they're pretty much useless. Which of course they are. I was just finishing school when they started adding interactive whiteboards to classrooms. What they generally meant was that most teachers stopped using the whiteboard because they had to log in to a computer, wait a few minutes, load up an application, wait a couple more minutes and then eventually be able to start writing on the board - rather than just being able to grab a pen and start writing. 
Once every few months, they'd get creative and have a fairly rubbish PowerPoint presentation. And once we even had an interactive quiz - we were all given remote controls and had to answer questions on the board. Only some of the remote controls didn't work, which meant that the quiz was more a test of whether the technology worked than whether people knew the answers to the questions.
The other problem with IWBs is that they are often low resolution. A friend of mine had great difficulty reading the board because it was heavily pixellated and was extremely hard to read from a distance. Teachers handwriting generally isn't readable at the best of times, but when it's being dragged through a pixellation process on technology that nobody in the room has been trained to use, it makes it all even more difficult. Worse than this though was the fact that the school would try hard to remove the non-interactive whiteboards from the classrooms, so that teachers would have to start using the technology, even if it wasn't appropriate.
The problem with technology in education is that most of the time, it's implemented extremely poorly. And that implementation is often accompanied by policy decisions at the administration level that lack a trust or wisdom.
At my university, we have a highly-restricted 'walled garden' setup on the machines. There are about four applications that they like - Internet Explorer, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. If you try and use anything other than those, you'll not get very far. Which is fine for 70% of users. But I would rather write my essays in Notepad and save them as ASCII text or XML. No can do. I'd rather use Firefox. No can do. I can't even open up multiple windows in Internet Explorer very easily - the Ctrl + N keyboard shortcut has been disabled.
We've got so many poorly implemented web filters too, even though the students at the college are mature enough not to go surfing for porn on college computers. So many perfectly sane Google queries are filtered because they contain an arbitrary keyword.
The solution to technology in education is simple - listen to teachers, not the government. If teachers start crying out that they want interactive whiteboards, give it to them. Many of them won't - not because they're technophobes or Luddites, but because a lot of the time, they're more trouble than they are worth. As for students, trust them. Punish them when they do wrong, but remember that most of these 'lock down' safety procedures cause more damage than they solve.
