Olathe ? Aesop’s fables came beaming across the classroom and landed in Eva Hernandez’s Palm hand-held.

On the bottom floor of Ridgeview Elementary School, she sat scrolling, using her stylus to navigate through “The Flies and the Honeypot.”

“Hmmm,” said the 12-year-old. “I think I can animate the flies.”

Eva, a sixth grader, is part of a new generation of kids using hand-helds to read, write, do math, take pictures of the human eye or research Egyptian hieroglyphics – all as a regular part of their curriculum.

As school districts scout ways to engage students already accustomed to instant messaging and interactive video games, they’re buying up the kind of tech tools once reserved for jet-setting corporate executives.

Educational sales of personal digital assistants, laptop computers and hand-held remote controls called “clickers” are ballooning nationwide. Last year, a survey by Quality Education Data Inc. found that 28 percent of U.S. school districts offered hand-helds for student and teacher use. One of every four computers purchased by schools was a laptop.

Austin Hicks, 12, left, and Eva Hernandez, 11, compare techniques as they create illustrations on their Palm Pilots for an assignment in their sixth-grade class at Ridgeview Elementary School in Olathe.

Electronic learning has become so popular that one school in Arizona went textbook-free this year, instead equipping its students with laptops. Seventeen schools outside Eugene, Ore., now use hand-helds on most science field trips.

Eva Hernandez’s district has spent $1.84 million to build “smart classrooms” with electronic interactive whiteboards, hand-held computers, DVD-VHS players, high-definition sound and video systems and wireless keyboards and mice, all of which connect to the teacher’s desktop computer. High schoolers use their Palms to write college applications and work through calculus problems. Nine-year-olds routinely “beam” in their homework, making the district a poster child for the digital classroom.

For Eric Johnson, who directs educational sales for Palm Inc., the manufacturer of Eva’s Zire 71 model, public schools represent a $300 million market. And as schools purchase hand-helds, dozens of spin-off industries are racing to integrate themselves into teachers’ lesson plans.

Ridgeview Elementary, which sits in a squat building on the edge of this booming Kansas City suburb, bought Zire 71 and Zire 72 models for the fourth and sixth grades. Aside from their basic functions, the hand-helds boast color screens, digital cameras, Internet capabilities and MP3 players. They easily can be hooked up to wireless keyboards.

Studies show that when used regularly, such media-rich instructional tools can work well to assess student performance.

But some worry that while children may learn to beam in their papers, this generation of “digital natives” could come up short in learning basic math, science and English.

“Despite the fact that we have spent gazillions of dollars in schools on technology, it’s still just a leap of faith that kids are better educated because of that,” said Robin Raskin, the founder and former editor of FamilyPC magazine. “Students need to have some opportunity to digest material serially, like reading a book from end to end.”